Coding Architecture: Digital Urbanities in New Media Art

Abstract

Throughout the history, cities have always been regarded as sites or centers of accumulation of political, economic, cultural, social and material resources. Today, in the age of ubiquitous computing, information and communication technologies have radically changed the role of cities as centers, transforming them into multiple nodes in the networks of dynamic data and communication flows, or into overexposed cities (P. Virilio). In other words, cities have entered a new mode of existence as non-geographic entities or “meta-cities” (W.Gibson) in which buildings are hardware and software is the way of life. In this paper, I will show how the convergence of digital and material spaces has affected the notions of architecture and urbanism and collapsed the boundaries between urban and rural, public and private, center and margin, near and far, here and there, etc. Through several examples of futuristic architectures in SF as well as through new media art practices which directly affect urban landscapes, I will discuss the notions of liquid or trans-architecture (M. Novak), relational architecture (R. Lozano-Hemmer) and living architecture (R. Armstrong) which, unlike traditional architectural practices, open up a space for renegotiations and newly emergent couplings between, reality and virtuality as well as between nature and artifice.