Arredamento Mimarlık, 2018
Alper Derinboğaz, Msc. Architect; Salon
The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed 1 .
According to Gibson, thinking and producing for the future has been associated with sci-fi literature, yet, it is a matter of looking more closely to present. Maybe it is even more related to the past.
However, knowing the past and following the latest innovations does not mean that we can make precise predictions about the future. People and products reach anywhere in the world faster than ever. To reach an information is in most cases only limited within the speed of connecting to the internet. We replaced single-layered information flow with multi-layered experience flow. Our voice and our sound can travel wherever we want or whatever we like. In other words, the notion of space and time sense is shifting or maybe also bending. According to a survey, only in 2017, we produced more data than throughout all of human history. The amount of technical knowledge that has been developed doubles every nine years. The only thing we are certain about this increasingly accelerated period – sometimes referred to as ‘exponential’- is that change is constant and will be increasing as well as knowledge generation, inventions, travels and – of course – inequality.
Digital currencies have completely changed the meaning of the nations as we know. The national currencies, roughly speaking, are almost the abstraction of the legal and economic values which societies believe and trust. But for the first time in history, digital currencies are more credible than other currencies which are the physical assets of any nation. In other words, we trust the digital communities in the virtual world more than state structure. Although we can not imagine what it will evolve exactly, this is the beginning of a new era. Considering the urban fabric, the historical and cultural heritage we are trying to protect, it is almost impossible to maintain as a majority but digital images remain forever in the ‘cloud’.
Relatively, the notion of ‘flâneur’ as poetic explorers of cities, is changing radically. The concept which defined modern urbanism and shaped the urban experience, replaced by ‘digital flâneurs’. The line between work and home which came into our lives as a consequence of the industrial revolution has increasingly blurred. Digital flâneur prefers to immerse into ‘flux’ experience with a hope of liberating itself from all these, including home, work, and the city. Perhaps it is tempting to let ourselves go with the flow due to the speed of change and our critical thoughts on the environment and the stereotypes. We see it as a way of being different, fictionalise our ‘personas’ which we can not have in our “real” life. By doing this, we all become labourer of digital platforms. The time we spare for exploration and novelty turned into a kind of media labour. Now, there is no separation between home and work. Today whenever our smartphone – even our bedroom – could be an office. The time which we collectively spend on any popular internet platform is a much longer period than entire history. Prior to the beginning of ‘information age’ we witnessed these experimental cities within dystopian projects of Superstudio, the most expressive of them was ‘Infinite Monument’ (Monumento Continuo) where we are all connected to a neutral wire of immensely repetitive grating systems as in this world.
This monotonous repetition is not just about the digital world, it must be about something beyond technological developments. Considering the current cities, the ‘megalopolis’ such as Shanghai, Istanbul, Mumbai are reflections of this endless expansion and monotony. We are witnessing the exchange of the numerical and virtual values of the economy into the real estates with various packages. Each area corresponds to a certain amount, and according to the circumstances, the multiplier of this value changes yet, unfortunately, the spatial quality is not affected by this value at all. Because it remains unimportant to respond to the n