As we currently sit within the depths of the digital age, our interactions with each other, space, time, and other bodily wants and needs are turned into data served to millions of viewers on-line. We are now experiencing things through posts on Instagram, rather than first hand. Information that begins to be altered, edited, and deleted at a person’s will, creating small glitches within the digital truth. A digital formulation of our natural biology and socialization, recalling constructed memory to form within a simple swipe.
How does digital media meet infrastructure? Will it always have an ethereal connotation like the Internet? An ideal landscape created within our individual profiles where we construct our memories through a series of likes, hashtags, and followers. Never having a site perfect enough for physical manifestation of one’s digital record because of the rapid change it undergoes. The potential hazards that come with joining a lawless international conglomerate.
The main structural layout of Instagram includes notifications like followers, likes, tags, comments, hashtags ,private or public accounts, and verification. Allowing the digital being to live in a relatively lawless realm, forcing perspective on one’s life, or producing many lives, i.e. many accounts. Creating a follower base, that fluctuates depending on your posts. Taking that structural layout and applying it into the physical world lends to a city. A lifespan of a well-designed building turns from 100 years into 1 day, collecting data and remaining informed of trends forming on-line. Status comes from how many followers and likes one receives, forming city boundaries. Relying heavily on digital information, with the hope of a new identities to form. Digital glitches providing a veil of comfort and self-obsession.Allowing the digital realm to aid in globalization of design, beliefs, and efficiency. A filtered truth in the loss of democracy.
Within the realms of fiction in both film and writing, there was a draw from books like Memory World, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Understanding Media. Many of these writings hit on the concept of memory through a dystopic view, hitting on the collection of memory and questioning what to is relevant and what can be thrown away.This then translated to more realistic works like Aldo Rossi’s Architecture and Memory, where he advocates that the city leaves traces of collective memory to translate and inform the current user.
Producing an artifact for the invisible contains information gathering through Online public entities. Instagram, a perfect place to harvest imagery over a period of time was used during this process. Gathering information about people; an individual photograph “ love myself before anyone else #self-care,” a couple “ I can’t believe I am marrying the love of my life in 28 days *insert cheeky hashtag*, a group “ GIRLS TRIP 2025”. Other photographs included, but not limited to, imagery of locations, architecture, lattes, activities, food, vegetation, young children, and political rampages. Collecting over 100 posts over a one month period, 65 of them are dedicated to images of human beings, the other 35 were spread over the other categories named above. In the efforts to physicalize the invisible, the photos were placed into a filter, abstracting the color out of the objects. Those colors allowed qualities like landscapes and city-scape to form, creating a collage between the invisible and the physical.
Social media remains site-less. Do you deem the site on where the headquarters of the social media lays or where the user uses the app? Where does social media not inhabit? The site cannot be bound by normal architectural constructs because that breaks the basic understanding of the Internet of being accessible by all. The characteristics of social media begins to distort conditions that can be applied to architectural settings. A set of digital glitches are created within profiles, whether it is through photoshopping, deleting unflattering pictures, unfollowing high school friends, or data mining, augmenting reality per profile. The loss of democracy is apparent through these glitches and are widely accepted by the collective as a necessary evil. The city comes to mind as a place that hosts the best representation of a digital realm, specifically within the sectors of the city created from different socialization, class, race, and economic status. The overlap between the loss of democracy in the digital realm versus that of the city come with sites like the doorway, the ally-way, the cross-walk, the bus stop, the elevator button, and the graffiti wall. All sites that come with their own rules, but have in common when altered by human interaction forms glitches within the system.
Questioning site conditions of Instagram when digital glitches become prevalent and how those can then be applied to architecture. What happens when two profiles, with different followers, beliefs, and economic status collide? Architecturally we see this through boundaries throughout a city-scape, in sites lacking democracy. Instances like the doorway, the elevator, the cross-walk, the bus stop, and the phone booth all have a set of rules to follow. Yet, human interference causes glitches in these rules, promoting a loss of democracy. The cross-walk for example with its signage and audio saying “do not cross” is given and followed by specific people, while others, potentially patrons of the city, bend the rules by jay-walking. The hope is to relay the concepts forged by Instagram and other social media platforms to expose the loss of democracy within elements in the city, and begin to uncover an urban environment addressing the issues created by those glitches, as well as promoting other characteristics of social media like speed, transparency, and a globalization, allowing for a faster pace physical embodiment of our collective memory.
Spatializing the digital realm becomes a question of drawing convention. With the capability and intention of things like social media, the only thing that is a consistent variable is speed of change. Everything in this world is always in motion, never being solidified because it marks the death of a growth and change within a profile. Italo Calvino brings an interesting question up in is writing of The Adventures of a Photographer in regards to capturing truth through a specific medium, in this case the medium being photography. In capturing the digital realm, what convention will expose the truth of architecture in social media? The concepts of digital glitches and loss of democracy must be translated through a series of mediums like photography, 2D drawing, physical models, and rendering formulating a new drawing convention. Yet, the drawing must be able to input new data from archives of social media, creating something that will forever be changing and altered exposing a truth within that moment. The question of either exposing truth or hiding it in order to progress the architectural implications is still up for debate. The search for an architectural truth within a glitch or seeking out spaces that have fallen to the loss of democracy will be in question throughout the workings of this thesis.
