Project
Connecting Limanarkasi 2019, Turkey, Ankara | An Urban Experiment with the concept of Stitching by Aslı Zeynep Doğan, Batuhan Gültaktı, Elif Saygın, Furkan Bora Kılıç, Meral Karakoyun
This project aims to develop an urban scenario for an abandoned industrial heritage site, Limanarkası, by integrating active forms of ‘grassroots urbanism’ and experimenting with the urban organizational concept of ‘stitching’. The Limanarkası district ,whose edges are occupied with boundaries preventing access, namely; a railway line, commercial harbor, and the Meles stream, is historically significant for the city of İzmir; it hosted the first examples of the New Republic’s industrial structures such as Sumerbank, Taris complexes and contributed to the ‘port city’ identity of Izmir. Although most of the industrial heritage still exists; the area is largely abandoned. Given the central location of this area, the need for a reconnection to the city is undeniable and overdue. Having several different definitions in the literature, we interpreted urban stitching as ‘implementing physical and virtual strategies for enabling sustainable development of an unused site by restoring its connections with people and the city’.
Gridscape | An illustrated representation of the hidden materialized digital society by Liina Lember
A dangerous shift is taking place. Data collection and surveillance technology have quietly crept into our society. With artificial vision and sensors, each and every person’s physical and digital movements are tracked, moved and stored in seemingly invisible webs of lighting high-speed cables and data centres. We are being trapped inside a sensing machine. In the land, city, architecture, workplace and home, each square meter is counted, sold and lobbied for. It’s an endless optimization. To the machine, our world is an imitation of Excel sheets where rectangles have a numerical function and possibility to become a part of a new formula in the infinite matrix of rows and columns. I call this the Gridscape.
Tool for life: Gridscape A dangerous shift is taking place. Data collection and surveillance technology are quietly creeping into our society. With artificial vision and sensors, each and every person’s physical and digital movements are tracked, moved and stored in seemingly invisible webs of lighting high-speed cables and data centres. We are being trapped inside a sensing machine. In the land, city, architecture, workplace, and home, each square meter is counted for and can be sold and lobbied for. It’s an endless optimization. To the machine, our world is an imitation of Excel sheets where rectangles have a numerical function and possibility to become a part of a new formula in the infinite matrix of rows and columns. I call this the Gridscape. Gridscape is a metaphor for our society and space, where everything is becoming increasingly more compartmentalized. Yet, at the same time, the gridscape is seamless. Without any disruptions, stops and limits. As if human progress doesn’t have an end. One can copy and replace each rectangle without losing the structure. The system has a seemingly perfect execution. Add one and you will not notice a change in the matrix. It is a hidden shadow in the rise of technology. Each square inside the grid is a representation of a square meter and once added value it will be counted for. It must have a positive value, it must balance the numbers below, it must be an investment of time, it must be a way forward. Everything organic fits into values – ecosystems, organic matter, animals, faces, living spaces, furniture, air, material – this can all be transformed into numbers. With this project, I am hoping to criticize and provoke dialogue within the new realms created by gridscape. I am questioning if the remote forces created for optimization are pushing all matter to be placed inside a rectangular matrix that is similar to an Excel sheet. Is the numb capitalist force applied to every aspect of new technology? Where or when do we stop? Is it a loop feeding itself? Finally, I want to remind the viewer that it is the human, who has invented the machine and this gridscape. —- ‘You talk as if God had made the Machine,’ cried the other. ‘ I believe you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it do not forget that.’ ‘But humanity, in its desire for comfort, had overreached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.’ E. M. Forster – The Machine Stops
Observation Lab | Pavilion of Tracking Sensations by Didem Zeynep Ödemiş & Ksenija Tajsić
Surveillance cameras monitor our movements and, as public, we are starting to accept intrusive measures- as if we were enjoying public surveillance. This pavilion aims to make a critique by creating an aesthetical representation of an invisible data collection, where visitors can be discovered and observed using methodologies of “tracking and watching systems”. Visitors will leave their traces of movements in space and experience the possibilities of newly generated faces, with system that recognizes (or does not) their new identities, further exposing them by revealing exact MAC addresses of their mobile devices. As a memory, at the end of the tour, visitors will receive feedback of their movements and tracking results as receipt.
We collect and provide enormous amounts of data during our daily routines – through social platforms, surveillance cameras and sensors, internet… But what happens to all that data collected? How is it collected? Are we even aware of technologies that are writing codex of surveillance? During a pandemic outbreak, we started experimenting with low-tech devices and their possibilities of becoming surveillance-system gadgets. Using softwares such as Touchdesigner and Arduino NodeMCU on laptops we had in our homes, we dug into the world of face and body recognition language, and created our own response to widely spread trends of observation technologies. The initial references we interpreted for the development of conceptual solution are located as experiments in urbanism, psychology and technological achievements: William H. White’s research “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”, Wundt’s and Helmholtz’s experiments on morphology of movements and Harold Edgerton’s visualizations of stroboscopic technology development. The working flow was structured through “bottom-up” approach, and was divided into “technological experiments” and “spatial creation”, implicating unification of media and architecture. Through technological experiments we managed to program a software that is distorting faces, recognizing them, locating bodily movements in space and representing them as motion slits, “sniffing” devices which receive WiFi signal and revealing their MAC addresses. Architectural space (pavilion) is, on the other hand, driven by technological components that it needs to carry out, and is set as a clean and simple structure which helps the media in creation of space and atmosphere.
Interview
KOOZ How would you define 'media architecture' and how does it relate to your project?
Ksenija Tajsić Media architecture is an opportunity to interpolate, connect and inject our interests, concerns and contemporary streams of our society, and to visualize and contextualize them into a present and meaningful space. It is a discipline on the “edge”… between the purity and rawness of technology and the interpretability and sensitivity of art, under the guise of architectural postulates. Our project lies on that. With it, we have shaped an atmospherical, architectural space that problematizes the time in which we live.
Didem Zeynep Ödemiş Media architecture is a new emerging field interested in the intersection of architecture, art, digital media, design and informatics. In this highly digitalized world we live in, our relation with the physical environments is changing. Media architecture is interested in how digital technologies are influencing our lives and built environment. It can be a wide variety of things, from a media facade, app, mapping, data visualization, artistic installation etc. Media architecture as an unconstrained open field that allows designers, artists and people from many other fields to discuss current issues in our society and speculate about the future. Our project addresses the issue of data protection and digital rights. Surrounded by cameras, sensors, apps and other surveillance technologies; we are producing an immense amount of data every day. We took a critical approach to the issue and raised the question: what happens to all these data and are we even aware that we are being observed?
KOOZ How and to what extent can media architecture be used to empower the digital citizen and their tights?
Liina Lember Media architecture can be used to critique, question and encourage discussion on digital citizen rights. Media architecture and its tools can be used to visualize the hidden opaque digital structures and systems.
KOOZ What are the biggest threats and opportunities which can arise from the realm of hyper surveillance we inhabit everyday?
Liina Lember | The biggest threats from hyper surveillance are threats to individual privacy and the monetization of our attention. Companies use and collect personal information about our purchase history, likes, preferences and habits for marketing purposes. The biggest opportunities are to use surveillance technology to protect natural resources such as forests and endangered animals and from gathered information impose new regulations and protection. We have a global overfishing and illegal wildlife trade problem and surveillance technologies could help us tackle these problems. Surveillance, although controversial in parts, is also used to maintain public safety either in physical or digital spaces.
KOOZ How and to what extent can media architecture be used to empower the digital citizen and their tights?
Aslı Zeynep Doğan | Batuhan Gültaktı | Elif Saygın | Furkan Bora Kılıç | Meral Karakoyun Media architecture gives way for citizens to engage more with the built environment, expressing their voice freely in a way that breaks the barriers of the built environment. As seen in our project, integrating the design decisions of professionals with a participatory sustainable system can create architecture that not only exists in physical form but also contribute to the online lives of its users. Accordingly, the proposed system allows for an inclusive online environment in which people are in control, give feedback, and remain active without any doubts on data protection.
Bio
The Media Architecture Biennale is the world’s premier event on media architecture, urban interaction design, and urban informatics. This year, due to the ongoing global pandemic the Media Architecture Biennale 20 (MAB20) had to be adapted and re-imagined. Therefore, the MAB20 Program will take place online:
- Workshops | June 24th – 29th | via Zoom
- Online Conference | June 30th – July 2nd | via virtual conference platform
Registrations are now open. For more information visit: www.mab20.org
