Surveillant City Lab

The current milieu or the non-lieu of urbanization is a polyphony of operational inclusion; of casting spatial potencies or hinderances, creating new cloudy entanglements, and transit subjects. It is as much about the control of scenarios, as it's about the chaos of locality. Surveillant city, as an amalgam of real and fictional localities, is the megastructure-by-chance repurposing humans, places, and nature into a larger project of the big data economy.

The Lab is the technical auxiliary / technical testing ground for the anthropoveillance project, a theoretical-discursive inquiry of surveillance as a designing practice, and design, as a paradigmatically surveillant practice and horizon. How is it that we come to know the collective space of life we call the city? The protocols of control, rituals of reassurance, syntaxes of communion, artifacts of automation are only some of the elements of this assemblage. An underlying presupposition for the Lab is that common architectural-theoretical frameworks are no longer adequate for grasping the world of human being and becoming. Additionally, the journalistic or even artistic encounters with the infrastructures of dataveillance/surveillance tend not to produce knowledge that can allow an architectural-theoretical understanding of the contemporary city to emerge. Given this, the Lab is charged to collect, catalog, and develop advanced techniques that afford an inquiry and a representation of the city beyond the map, or the normative architectural gaze.


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