Exhibition Opening + Discussion "The City as Interface"

Montag, 01/21/2019
19:00 Uhr
halfway
Halbgasse 3–5
1070 Vienna
Visual Culture Unit

The City as Interface

Opening: 21.1.2019, 7pm
Opening hours: 22.1.–26.1., 3pm to 6pm)
halfway, Halbgasse 3–5, 1070 Vienna

We warmly welcome you to a presentation and discussion of outcomes of a workshop led by Benjamin Gerdes, New York-based artist and 2018 Fulbright Specialist at TU Wien, and Christian Frieß, researcher at the Visual Culture Unit for the FWF-research project „Data Publics“, with master and PhD students of the Visual Culture module at the School of Architecture and Planning, TU Wien.
 
From small scale neighborhood projects to collaborative city-making, from optimizing urban infrastructures to solving all kinds of social problems, platforms have stretched into almost all dimensions of the social and urban fabric in many places already. What is common to all those platforms is that huge amounts of data are aggregated and processed. Data, which is incessantly created and/or used, intentionally and/or unintentionally, by citizens interacting with both, the physical and the digital environment. However, platforms are not neutral mediators but infrastructures which embody ideologies and visions – be it technocratic utopias, social agendas or neoliberal politics – and they shape new public spheres: „data publics“.
 
Students investigated this „platform mentality“ through mapping projects during the winter semester and, while developing these visualizations, discussed how architecture facilitates new encounters between people, data, and space in these contemporary visions for the 21st century city. What orientation do related projects take up in relationship to the accumulation of data, capital, and/or state or economic power?
 
With works by Andrea Börner, Mathias Hofer, Ruth Köchl, Karina Pricop, Nairi Summerhammer, Dominik Tannenberger, Tim Felix Weber.
 

The event is generously hosted by halfway in the context of the exhibition „Dividuality of Spaces / Spaces of Dividuality“. Halfway is a site for the spatialization of acute urban phenomena; a space in which methods of artistic research inform a practice of urban curating; a laboratory in which social relationships are translated into design. “Curating the Urban. On Spatializing Urban Conditions” is funded by the Program for Arts-Based Research (PEEK AR 00405) of the Austrian Science Fund FWF and is hosted by the Institute of Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

http://visuelle-kultur.net/
https://global-architecture.org/
http://datapublics.org
https://www.halfway.at/