Machinelike Tendencies

"AMONG A GROWING ARRAY of government-sanctioned informational systems, motion sensors, acoustic monitors, biometric scanners, and thermal cameras work in tandem with sprawling private networks of data brokers to track social and environmental flows with forensic precision. They measure footfalls, scan license plates, log financial transactions, and inspect the movement of people alongside particulate matter. As sensing technologies increasingly oversee and overwrite the spatial production of contemporary life, proposals for "smart cities" and other data-dependent composites-proliferating since the early 2010s-obfuscate regimented environments of surveillance and control through rosy prospects of connectivity, security, and risk management, all sustained by the tenacious dystopian dream we call information."

"Setting out to trace how systems of information are closely imbricated with cities, states, and their denizens, " Constantinos Doxiadis's Informational Modernism: The Machine at the Heart of Man" -an expansive research and exhibition project led by curators Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Mark Wasiuta, which debuted at Onassis Stegi in Athens in 2023 and is currently on view at the Venice Architecture Biennale-positions the late Greek architect's practice as ground zero for architecture's entanglement with information technologies."

Motion sensors, acoustic monitors, biometric scanners, and thermal cameras operate alongside private data-broker networks to track social and environmental flows with forensic precision. These systems measure footfalls, scan license plates, log financial transactions, and record people’s movements alongside particulate matter. Proposals for “smart cities” and other data-dependent frameworks obscure regimented environments of surveillance and control through promises of connectivity, security, and risk management. An expansive research and exhibition project situates Constantinos Doxiadis’s practice as a focal example of architecture’s deep entanglement with information technologies and the planning approaches that both enable and normalize pervasive informational oversight.

Read at Artforum