Simon Weckert - The Map Becomes The Territory - Street 3.0
Interface Cultures Guest Lecture Series - 30.01.2024
Platforms like Google Maps have become crucial gateways for understanding the world. However, they harbor significant gaps and biases, often resulting from processes of exclusion. As a result, their digital augmentations act more like distortions than reflections, illuminating only certain facets of the world at the expense of others. This doesn’t necessarily mean fairer futures are impossible, but it does reinforce existing power dynamics. As the digital becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, the idea of what the internet was and could be turns out to be a mere wishful thinking. The geography of the internet now encompasses more than just mapping virtual realities and digital worlds. In fact, the cities we live in are much more than just their physical presence. Take the place where you live as an example: you are surrounded by buildings and streets, concrete, bricks, and glass, houses, and shops. But you are also surrounded by information and code, invisible to the naked eye, yet fundamentally changing how the city functions and how we interact with it. This means we are all now digital geographers. The cities we live in are shaped by a digital framework, by digital infrastructure and architecture, and by the digital media and platforms that influence a large part of our social relationships.
Simon Weckert likes to share knowledge on a wide range of fields from generative design to physical computing. His focus is the digital world – including everything related to code and electronics under the reflection on current social aspects, ranging from technology oriented examinations to the discussion of current social issues. He seeks to assess the value of technology, not in terms of actual utility, but from the perspective of future generations and uses technology in the digital space to cleverly impact the physical space, all the while creating some playful mischief. The outcomes are technological systems, installations and hybrid objects that strive to make complicated issues accessible.
More at simonweckert.com