Stimulation, speculation, simulation : the architecture of the captured city that the corporation gave us

Abstract

For thousands of years, architecture built itself from a history of its own understanding of itself. A retracing over time, architecture was inherited from its past. Over time, sets of ideals were built collectively, with the city as its manifesto. It could be argued that the architecture built was in response to an architecture that already existed. the production of making architecture made cities, and further, showcased architecture as a way of thinking. Diagrammatic thinking produces diagrammatic architecture. Orthographic thinking produced orthographic architecture [1]. Machines have learned to compound a retracing of time through creating systems of algorithms that recursively produce patterns of understanding through their recordings of human behavior. The model is based on recording the past to predict the future. Increasingly, our cities have been non-stop recorded through various and ubiquitous sensing devices. The city is then re-represented afterward, through the eyes and interpretation of the machine. Or rather, by the eyes of the machine by the men who made the machine see the way they want the machine to see, building a proxy city, a representation of the real world, to help make choices in the distant and near future. How might we begin to imagine architecture as collective intelligence within this new system? Imagining architecture as a type of metadata. Mined through vision, camera, surveillance technology, connecting various strands of metadata produced surveillance capitalisms abilities. Imagine other connections mining this figural metadata could produce for a second just processing the knowns and unknowns, speculating on the possible city in Rumsfeldian ways, knowing from these systems, it is that they have the capabilities to find patterns and order not before seen. When past behavior is the basis of predicting future behavior, how might we revisit the city that was, to forge the city to come?