Symposium Participation

Darío Negueruela, scientific coordinator of DVS, partisipated in the Symposum “Aerial Spatial Revolution in Architecture and Urbanism” organized by Matteo Vegetti and Christoph Frank at (USI-SUPSI)

Through interdisciplinary approach, the symposium explores the influence of the conquest of the air – from the first flight experiences to contemporary satellites – on the way of thinking, designing and practising space. The general framework is based on the concept of “Raumrevolution” (Spatial Revolution) introduced by the jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt in Land and Sea (1941), but then implicitly present also in other authors (e.g. Wölfflin, Panofsky, Giedion, Koyré, and Kern).

Abstract

Satellite images feed our daily intake from social media and television, illustrating the violent spatial reach of surveillance with uncanny perseverance since the first Gulf War. However, it would be misleading to consider this as a confirmation of long gone modernist scopic regimes. As most of the data stream from our ubiquitous and interconnected sensing devices, satellite imagery is not primarily intended to be processed visually by humans. Instead, these images are already networked and operative, being processed by other machines and triggering actions without our direct intervention through digital twins and other simulations Remote sensing and imagery becomes just an additional input source for these, conceptually breaking the traditional hierarchies of distance, focus, and resolution. Nonetheless, some of these contemporary Machine Learning techniques (eg. image super-resolution) point towards a contemporary machinic version of erotic and projective imagination. If vision is not a re-covery of pregiven features, but a sensori-motor enactment of a possible world, how can the conception and imagination of new environments work in the times of AI? Opening the doors to reimagine Space Ship Earth anew, this unexpected turn casts our longing and procreative gaze straight back at the cracks of our planetary sprawl, as if it were ruins to be interpreted and colonized.

Video: https://vimeo.com/733157984