One day event organized by Into the Black Box and the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory with the support of Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana and Fondazione Gramsci.
—
Program
5:00 PM Exhibition Opening
5:30 PM Roundatble “Platform Urbanism and Its Discontents”
10:00 PM Exhibition Closing
—
Exhibition “Into the Black Boxes of Platform Urbanism”
Curated by Into the Black Box
Artworks by Lucia Babina, Collettivo WUXU, Davide Blotta, Ilaria Depari, Giulio Di Meo, Into the Black Box, Michele Lapini, Dario Sanna
Platforms are becoming crucial vectors of urban transformations. They colonize cities embedding the social fabric into valorization circuits, both symbolic and material. Dwellers become entrepreneurs in competition on marketplaces. Streets, neighborhoods, areas are codified, ranked and hierarchized into categories of use. Services grow hybridizing material and digital spaces. Nevertheless, platform’ supposed horizontality hides the inscrutability of its algorithms, management and mechanisms. Despite the narrative of the progress and sharing, forms of discontent develop along with platform expansion. They contest working conditions, gentrification, data transparency, profit distribution.
The exhibition proposes eight different perspectives on platform urbanism. Each box of a Dumbo pavilion hosts a particular artwork of a photojournalist or artist. The contributors reflect on several features of the platform urbanism, from workers’ protests to the effects on environment. All together they propose a multifaceted gaze on this phenomenon. Put it differently, the exhibition invites the spectator to enter into the secret core of platforms and discover the hidden mechanisms of power they keep.
—
Talk “Platform Urbanism and Its Discontent”
Intervention by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer (curators of the Austrian pavilion at Biennale Architettura 2021)
Relations: Yvonne Hütter (Marie-Curie Fellow), Lucia Babina (Cultural Activist), Carmen Lael Hines (Platform-Austria pavilion)
Discussant: Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna – Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory)
By reorganizing access to a wide spectrum of fundamental domains, such as education, housing, health care, or even political information, platforms are destined to become the most powerful players regulating the way we live in cities. Digital platforms such as Facebook, Uber, Airbnb and Amazon embody not only new types of enterprises but also a completely new culture of life—from the products we handle and the services we use every day to entire urban neighborhoods that will be built by major platform enterprises in the next few years. These multi-scalar changes raise significant questions about the social potentials and risks of the architecture of these all-encompassing ecosystems.
