060

Authors:

 Duarte, Fábio.

Title:

 Emerging places from cyberterritories

Keywords:

 Cyberterritories - urban fluxes - city - informational fluxes - critical art projects

Abstract:

 Cyberspace is an informational network constructed by telecommunication and computer technologies, which make possible most of our contemporary references and actions. But we won't live in cyberspaces. Never. Space is established by the existence of fluxes and objects, creating the basis for all relationships among agents, actions and objects. Place is a determined position in space and time from where every other element - stable or in movement, perennial or ephemeral - acquires significance. Territory is a portion of space defined by its management limits; so, from biology to geopolitics, the idea of territory is linked to the idea of domain. When we think about cyberspace, the notion of territory must be linked with the idea of informational management. Contemporary cities are being transformed by the informational fluxes. These transformations are concrete, they reshape the city beyond its digital territories. Most of urban planners cannot deal with these active informational changes using their traditional intellectual and representational tools. Most of info-artists cannot deal with these changes using an abstraction which loses any power when encounters the concrete city. Cyberterritories are exactly on the smooth limits of urban and informational space. Krzysztof Wodiczko's Alien Staff project deals with refugees, people in transit through the globe, living beyond geopolitical barriers. They live in an uncertain global space but also in concrete (sometimes unfriendly) and specific urban environments. Video, memorabilia, personal stories recorded in different languages, and contacts between locals and aliens, mediated by these technological tools, create an extremely personal interface which announces the power and fragility of the contemporary global/local reality.
Knowbotic Research's IO_dencies project is a dynamic digital environment, based on the Internet and magnetic fields, constructed by urban informations inputs - texts, images, videos, sounds. Working on Tokyo and now on São Paulo, with local architects, after multidisciplinary discussions, they have constructed a potent metaphor tool to think contemporary urban fluxes. Based on these projects, on which I have participated, I will discuss the critical interval of the informational and geographical territories, the cyberterritories, that build contemporary urban environments.
Duarte, Fábio. fduarte@usp.br Fábio DUARTE, architect (University of São Paulo - USP), is preparing his PhD at School of Communications and Arts, USP, about Deterritorialization and contemporary nomadism, with a Fapesp scholarship. He is author of the books Global and local in contemporary world, Moderna, São Paulo, 1998; and Architecture and Information Technology: from industrial to digital revolution, AnnaBlume + Fapesp, São Paulo, 1999, result of his Master thesis concluded at the Multimedia Department, Unicamp. He is an invited researcher at the Centre of Planning and Regional Development (CRAD) of University Laval, Québec, Canada (from August 1998 to March 1999). During this period he has also worked with the Group of Media Art Research (GRAM) of University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM). He has worked with Emanuel Pimenta, Lisbon, Portugal; and V2_Organisatie, Rotterdam, where he was involved in Krzysztof Wodiczko's Alien Staff project. Since its beginning, he is one the editors of the Knowbotic Research project