Digital Territories - The Symposium
Short essay by Andreas Broeckmann about the DEAF96 symposium.
The DEAF96 Symposium takes the thematic triangle of
architecture, urban culture, and electronic networks indicated
by the title, "Digital Territories", and investigates their
mutual relationships and the impact they have on each other.
This field is still very much a myth of the future, yet,
it is becoming possible to describe its emerging matrix
and the real effects that the meshing of the virtual and
the actual are producing. These effects reshape the material
world surrounding us as well as the mediated forms of communication
and behaviour, which are relayed by electronic media. The
ambivalence of the notion of the "digital territories" may
serve as a reminder that what we are talking about can be
open fields of unstructured forces and closed off, regulated
and controlled areas, that they are trans-geographical network
structures as much as heterogeneous and contradictory utopias,
places that are shaping up to become the sites of old and
new forms of social agency that remain impossible to map
conclusively. The symposium is set within
the context of DEAF96 as a site of theoretical reflexion
where artists and architects represented in the festival
enter into discussion with critics, urban planners and theoreticians.
It includes a series of analyses combining economics, politics
and sociology with critical discussions of art, architecture
and design. The symposium raises the question what the relations
are between electronic and non-electronic spaces and how
social and economic formations are articulated in networked
environments. In this context, Saskia Sassen looks at how
the digital is embedded in the real world and shows how
power relations are reconfigured in new forms of territorial
behaviour and social stratification: "cybersegmentation".
The
task of designing 3D virtual environments as spaces for
working, trading and living is crucial for the future shape
of human relations in networked societies. Edouard Bannwart
presents examples of the development of interfaces between
real and virtual environments and discusses their potential
for organising forms of interaction that are increasingly
extended, accelerated, and translocal. In response, Carlos
H. Betancourth talks about the social and work relations
that emerge in such networked environments and raises the
question of how distributed working processes give shape
to new relations of power and control in virtual companies.
What will the future culture of networked
communities and networked communication be? Will it be possible
to use network culture for improving social relations on
a translocal level and in virtual public spaces? Martin
Pawley describes how the civic and urban centres have given
way to touristic ersatz cities and transurban zones without
cultural identity. For him, electronic media facilitate
a process in which the achieved functions of urban centres
are carved out and exported into translocal interzones,
leaving the city centres as sites of a consumable reality,
a "stealth" reality, mere facades of a culture that has
disappeared for good
The "digital territories"
crucially frame the construction of new forms of identity.
Will these be consumer lemmings or decentred subjects who
can act without predetermination and who are open to unassimilated
otherness? McKenzie Wark theorises subjectivity in mediated
communities as a vector, a process performed in culturally
expanding territories. He describes a networked world in
which mediated reality and mediated selves are the only
reference points we have: "We no longer have roots, we have
aerials".
Such scenarios offer a great challenge
to contemporary artists, architects and designers who are
trying to get to grips with the new forms of "collective
creativity", of "independent machine agency" and of "networked
communication". Pierre Lévy's text that is included
in this section of the catalogue as an introduction, investigates
the parameters of interfacing virtual worlds and real cities
and makes suggestion for the creative development of digital
territories as fields of representation, of articulation
and of interaction.
