The City as a Data Field

A Project of the Cultural Year 2020

The pandemic marks the beginning of an interim period. In our response to the natural disaster, contradictions of the fourth industrial revolution become highly visible. The disappearance of the old “normal” in “social distancing” and accelerated structural change opens the view for new opportunities. Now we can decide in which attitude we want to face the future: Passive and submissive or actively designing?

The festival exhibition The City as a Data Field. How We Want to Live in the Future is one of the larger projects of the extended Cultural Year 2020 and is part of the thematic focus “Digital Living Environments”. It raises the question of how the individual and society are doing with global networking, “big data” and “navigating through data”. “First we make data, then they make us”—what possibilities of “humanisation” (Flusser) are opened up by technology, what do we need to consider?

The narrative of The City as a Data Field. How We Want to Live in the Future follows images proposed by the philosopher of technology Vilém Flusser and his plea for moving towards “designing fate” and venturing utopia as a playful testing of alternative possibilities of a “decent” life in response to the crisis. According to Flusser, the “we” to be reconfigured could be “no longer subject to values, but composes them instead.”

Flusser’s visionary background provides the stage for addressing the conflict between efficiency and optimisation versus personal and collective freedom of choice. The City as a Data Field. How We Want to Live in the Future is about the advance of data-driven automatic control into more and more intimate personal spheres of life. Whether “smart city”, “smart home”, choice of partner and family planning, body implant or child rearing—the ubiquity of data control in public and private products and services in the post-digital age of Industry 4.0 demands a reflection on the goals that guide us.