Data Polis Abstract

Abstract Labyrinth of the World how data are connected to the polis. Koolhaas’s works on “Delirious new York” and “The generic city”. “how to embrace new media technologies and nature? Are cities really getting better or just brighter? how to design hybrid cities and Sustainable living?” multiple identities of the city: are data indifferent to the polis memory and condition? A new comenius’s “labyrinth of the World”? Any authentic polis confronts itself in a frame of similar entities. A plasma of data has transformed this chaothic and borderless eco-system: no polis is autonomous from data and wireless technology is reconfiguring our life. Around 1960s, the first megastructure architects (i.e.Yona Friedman, constant, the Japanese metabolists) stimulated the encounter “between architecture and computer technology” (rouillard, interactive cities). “how to embrace new media technologies and nature? Are cities really getting better or just brighter? how to design hybrid cities and Sustainable living?” [Adaptation: designing the future city (Shanghai, 2010)]. in the chance-like nature of the city, data enters a metropolis in perpetual motion. Koolhaas brought us from Delirious new York, decennia later, towards “The generic city”(1995). how to focus on data in a general urban condition which happens everywhere? how to integrate datapolis based on a tabula rasa, like many cities in the Far east? in our “post-utopiasness” age, data bring us to a pur, city in sanskrit ( i.e. Singapur), to disquieting multiple identities: are data indifferent to the polis memory and condition? Will a comenius’s labyrinth of the World be built again? franco torriani Scroll down for the text "The Labyrinth of the World "

Achilleas Kentonis, Franco Torriani, Dimitris Charitos

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The Labyrinth of the World * franco torriani

Any authentic polis, as happened in ancient historical times with genuine city-states in Greece, has to confront in a frame of about similar entities. In recent decennia we give for granted that a plasma of data has dramatically changed this chaotic and borderless ecosystem. Any polis is profoundly involved in a fluid of data. Of course this was not the case in earlier times in Greece and besides the European continent , even if various links were still there... To resume,"Technology has now seeped into our towns...."(Chatelet). A pervading technology: "The fiberoptical lines underneath our streets, and the wireless network in the air " (Huang and Waldvogel). "Wireless technology is reconfiguring our way of life. Distinctions between daily life, work and leisure are blurred trough the use of such technology. New ways of using space are emerging and moving towards real time management...." ( Schmitt, Ratti and Berry) (1). We could mention, going back to almost half a century ago, Dennis Crompton'sComputer City (1964), a "metropolis combined with electronic changeability", as a network without structure or architecture... Had the architecte become a superprogrammer? "(Rouillard). WhereasPlug-in City - says Rouillard- "...was made up of connections to a network...". In his text to me is particularlyinteresting what he indicates around the years 1958-60..., when "....The first megastructure architects (i.e.Yona Friedman, Constant, and the Japanese Metabolists) made their contribution to the genealogy of this encounter between architecture and computer technology" (2). By assuming -I hope I understand Siegfried Zielinski properly- that media are spaces of action for constructed attemps to connect what is separated. Going back in "deep time media" history (Zielinski), some media of previous centuries might help us to navigate in today media landscape and give also us a glimpse ahead (3). How to combine this with the mongrel of the contemporary city, considering cities have been built using very different patterns in all parts of the world, and still are? ".......The increasingly 'hybrid' nature of contemporary cities (...) requires us to continually rethink the paradigms that we use when analysing cities.." (Boyer).Information data, links, connections take the the place of "...the long-held privileged status of Cartesian Geometry (...)." Increasingly, as Manuel Castells suggests, these processes are directly supporting the emergence of an international-integrated and increasingly urbanised, and yet highly fragmented,Network Society that straddles the planet (...). At the same time, however, premium and high capability networked infrasctructures often effectively by-pass less-favoured and intervening places and what Castells calls 'reduntant' users..". "Mobility, infrastructure networks, and flows are thus emerging as major emphases of 2

contemporary architectural and urbanistic theory and practice...(..) Koolhaas, Easterling, Martin Pawley insist, in short, that in the contemporary city, more than ever, 'infastructure, architecture and landscape amalgamate to become one complex (Angélil and Klingmannm) (....). (4) The concept of hybrid, a mixed result either in the origins or in characters of something, applied to the data-polis complicated relationship is deeply related to the condition of being immersed in a due context. It is a "multidimesional" immersion with entangled issues and effects going from the hybrid (data)polis to the bodies concerned. The city and the body. The civitas - the city- is not walled any more, at least not phisically, one of the many questions is if (its) Human Inhabitants are still capable of orientating themselves. This question is always open, data flows could provide an up to date set of answers. "The forgotten act" of Vilém Flusser is still intriguing: " Man has forgotten that it was him who generated the images for orientating himself in the world. When he lost the capacity to decode them, he started to live as the result of his own images. Imagination has turned into hallucination" We know of the high speed of data and of the low one of architecture, sometimes we tend to understimate that we live in a constrained space, even If I admit that the concept of space has been one of the most fascinating and debated ones in times. "The living world inhabits a constrained space. It is subjected to drastic conditions of viability. Until today, its survival and biological 'impertinence' have depended upon random abilities to adapt, which increasingly demonstrate the limits of the elasticity. The living world no longer appears as an edenic biomass, but as a convulsive living substance...". There are severe assaults due to "...the pressure of all-conquering urbanisation and the demographic explosion of one dominant species" (Bec)(5). Sensible questions like: "How do we embrace new media technology and nature?", and "How do we design for Hybrid Cities and Sustainable living?" (6), relate seriously to the abilities to adapt (see above). Phisical and digital - to use this terminology in a broad sense!- are more and more interwined and connected spaces, this is a positive and revolutionary phenomenon, but it is not free of charge. It is realistic to admit that "....our planet is being segmented into clearly distinct spaces, defined by different time regimes"(7). It is almost a trivial question, but it is there. It is crucial to focus on the biological body in this analysis which considers hybridization and immersion combined effects. The concept of cyborg, i hope I resume correctly Bernard Andrieu's text, "...is still used to argue for the mechanization and the dehumanization of the living. The biological body is repeared, dissected and implanted. Hybrid exists..."(8). "We have been cyborgs for some time now. However - says Pavel Sedlak- only recently the biotechnological culture has evolved as an open creative and educational practice(...).What is most significant to me is the freedom of positioning man (..) along with other species and 3

the whole non-human world, including all types of data, systems and machines which pilot our existence in the frame work of ever more complex processes..."(9) We embody technologies, we have to reflect on it continuously. and on the consequences on our (multiple?) identities and body practices, in short, on our immersion in the world. The immersion of the body in the technique - says Bernard Andrieu- is neither a fusion, nor a confusion, "it is a new experience": To live hybrid engages the subject in his body and in a corps à corps -hand-to-hand with the tecnique, without beeing always sure to control the effects (10). Michael Peter Smith's thesis that, all urban places are now "...in a sense, 'translocalities' with multifaceted and multiscaled links and connections..." , seems to me a very interesting argument. The need, following the author, "..to expand the study of trasnational urbanism to encompass the scope of transnational processes....", may be fundamental in a interdisciplinary and transnational network of experiences based on very different traditions and approaches (11). I am tempted to put in relation 'translocalities' and, as regards the body, with somatechnics and biosubjectivity.

Trying to resume Andrieu's words , "...Somatechnics implies in his principle the hybridization of technic in or on the body to constitutre a new possibility of perception and action". How to combine nature and culture ?...., considering that "the body is not only natural or strictly reducibile to a cultural datum". (...). The hybrid frontier, he says ,...is related to the disintegration of the body. (This disintegration) "..defines a hybrid frontier of the intersection of biotechnology and nanotechnology. (..)The distinction between the body and embodiment disappears in the condition of the constant engagement of our embodies interaction with the environment". (12) I wonder if the sciences of complexity are not a seriously suitable and adequate factor to approach the datapolis issues as they have emerged in recent years. "The concept of 'complexity' (...) brings to these interrelationships a new global dimension of coherence, in conceptual, instrumental and prospective terms" (Bec). Extrapolation, very connected to these sciences, "...generally arises from a certain capacity to extract a 'known thing' from its context and apply it to another field...." It embraces "...Experimental artistic activities, scientific research and technological developments..". In fact, the possibility , via modelling, simulation, combinatory optimisation, to obtain "...scientific-artistic tools for forging new links between the real world and the conceptual, logical and imaginary fields..." (13). A couple of questions in conclusion: What is and what will be the role of arts in datapolis? In our post-utopiasnessage data bring us tu a pur, city in Sanskrit, with its disquieting multiple identities: are data indifferent to the polis memory and condition? A Comenius's Labyrinth of the Worldbuilt again? A labyrinth is intricated, but apparently plenty of passages... 4

Notes

(Notes have to be completed with more info and data) (1)Interactive Cities , in "Anomalie digitral_arts", issue editor Valérie Chatelet, n 6, 2007. (2) ibidem

(3) Zielinski

(4) .. in Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin,Splintering Urbanism

(5) Louis Bec, catalogue of Festival @rt Outsiders, 2009. As regrads V. Flusser, see the installation of Connie Mendoza,Numerical Desert, 2009. (6)Adaptation, designing the future city, an event organized by the Dutch Cultural Center, Shangai, 2010.,

(7) see note 4. One comment: virtual all cities (..) are starting to dispaly spaces that are powerfully connected to other 'value' spaces area...(..) At the same time,.., there is often a palpable and increasing sense of local disconnection in such place, from phisically close, but socially and economically distant, places and people.... (8) Bernard Andrieu, in Pluripotential, several authors, edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Warren Neidich.

Cfr: Immersion, The new pluripotentiality does not result in becoming inorganic, buth rather a biosubject (Laurentis T, see Andrieu) Haraway: "Haraway refuses the ((re)productionist single vision which reiterates the same old story of technology as either good or bad, liberatory or oppressive..." (9) Dialogue wth Pavel Sedlak, on Unsafe Dinstance, published on ww.noemalab.org.

(10) Bernard Andrieu, Les avatars du corps hybridation somatechnique, 2011. Personal translation. (11) Quoted in Splintering Urbanism, see note 4. (12) see note 8.

(13) Louis Bec, see note 5.

* This is an abstract/outline of my speech at the Datapolis Symposium, Enter 5, 5th art/tech biennale, Prague April 2011

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