It is clear that technology progresses at a higher speed than our ability to adapt and use the new materials or systems at their full potential. Beyond inevitable collisions, we observe in real time the reconfiguration of social interactions in a space mediated by digitalization, which leads to a higher change of cultural paradigm.
At a first glance, the changes in the physical space seem easily acceptable, or even unnoticeable. In our increasingly smarter cities, invisible sensors constantly gather a huge amount of information (the so-called big urban data), more in a day than in the last hundred years. Archives are created with flows of traffic, movement and break times, analysis of air composition, marker flows on various things, tweets, likes and visits. One does not know exactly what they will be used for, but it is clear that they will be used in the future, and the success will go to the one able to use them. From the pessimistic scenarios (Paul Virilio, for instance) forecasting feelings of anxiety, the loss of reference points, technocracy, and increased social discrepancies etc., to the optimistic ones (the physics of the future for Michio Kaku) which bet on a safer, healthier and more comfortable life, everything seems possible. But, most likely, people will always keep the right balance. Though one can never be sure of people.
The beauty comes when those data are made visible, people understand what they see and this translation means going from information to knowledge. At one end, key decisions of urban planning are taken based on such statistical diagrams; at the other, the residents of a city may have an impulse for the urban administration, may increase the dialogue or may set up, in time, new communities.
Media architecture is seen as the most recent art and craft of space modelling in the digital era. This new area may bring together multiple opportunities of mediation with most diverse issues and requests, from arts to politics and entertainment to environmental sciences: “To me, it is not about technology. It is about materials that are provisioned to mediate interactions by designing spaces that use specific modalities in order to manifest a certain set of values”. This is how the field was described by Martin Brynskov, the director of the second edition ofMedia Biennale in Aarhus, Denmark. This definition extends the concept of media to its most extreme physical element, taking at the same time the concept of architecture to its most non-physical meaning. Projects presented at the biennale will be featured in the coming issues of Zeppelin, stay tuned!
Until then, only an example of an application getting Aarhus (recently selected for the 2017 European cultural capital) ready for the cultural transition to a smart city status:
City Bug Report is an installation set on the city hall tower for the biennale and which will work until December. The building was designed by the great Danish architect Arne Jacobsen, and is classified as a monument since 1997, so any intervention needs to be completely reversible. (As a coincidence, in 1937, when the project started and he was asked to produce a monumental building, Arne Jacobsen pleaded for a rather democratic architecture, finally accepting the construction of the tower, but which he made to be surrounded by a scaffolding structure, to look like a construction site for ever!). On a truly light structure, rather behind the structure of the tower, 4 layers made of 5,500 leds (Pixel) were placed on 4 successive levels, each one being managed by a controller. The content displayed on the layers is part of the “City Bug Report” system, through which people in Aarhus can digitally talk about issues coming in their city (via internet or smartphone). A series of differently coloured dots (red, blue) goes on those layers, each dot standing for a critical case (bug) in a certain stage, depending on the time and the problem-solving status. In one day, those small animations show the lifecycle of various bugs coming along one year, and constantly updated. Finally, when the issue is sorted out by municipality, the dot turns white and then goes away.
The project is completed in cooperation with the Media Architecture Institute and Aarhus University / PIT / CAVI with the support of AHL Mediafacades which covered the hardware. But the top challenge was, obviously, that for the municipality, which accepted a difficult thing, namely to introduce an administrative information in an open-data system (information available to anyone, and which is, in its turn, created by the contributions of the public). The tower of the Aarhus City Hall is now the most visible representation of that vision, a genuine democratic instrument specific to the smart city.
Photo: Media Architecture Biennale / Rasmus Steengaard
