Imagine a life where the real and the virtual have merged into a singularity, into a megastructure of planetary-scale computation that manifests as a machine world. It comprises of layers of hardware, software, chemical, biological, and electrical systems where humans co-exist with non-humans.
TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself) by Peter Thiedeke is a visionary and thought-provoking multimedia installation presented at the T&G Building for Now or Never. It invites us to ponder the future of urban life in an era of ubiquitous technology and artificial intelligence.
Over three lunchtimes Experimenta will host a series of talks at the foot of Peter Thiedeke’s installation TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself) and located in the spectacular atrium of the T&G Building at 161 Collins Street.
TALK #3: The Myth of the City
Thursday 29th August, 12.30 – 1.30pm
Our third and final talk frames Peter Thiedeke’s TWIFSY installation by unpacking the seductive utopian mythos surrounding smart cities enabled by ubiquitous AI, sensing networks, and automated systems – while also examining the darker pragmatic realities and risks that such a future may entail.
On one hand, the efficiency, sustainability, and quality-of-life benefits envisioned by proponents of smart cities are enormously appealing. But TWIFSY also hints at more existentially troubling scenarios where individuality is subsumed into a monolithic computational “machine world.”
Are smart cities a human-centered solution or a step toward privileging technology over people? How much privacy, autonomy and democratic agency may be sacrificed at the altar of optimisation?
This talk will explore the nuanced trade-offs between TWIFSY’s sleek, integrated rendering of neo-utopian urban living and the work’s darker undertones of mass systemisation and social regimentation. It will examine the myth of the smart city through multiple lenses – architectural, environmental, political, philosophical – to separate science-fiction from reality and imagine how to cultivate the best aspects of both.
Facilitator: Nathan Scolaro
Speakers: Kaj Lofgren, CEO of Regen Melbourne; Dr Troy Innocent, Snr Lecturer at RMIT.
Supported by:
Speakers
Kaj Lofgren
Kaj Lofgren is the CEO of Regen Melbourne, an engine for ambitious collaboration, in service of Melbourne.
Kaj Lofgren
Kaj (pronounced Kai) is the CEO of Regen Melbourne, an engine for ambitious collaboration, in service of Melbourne. Powered by an alliance of more than 200 organisations, Regen Melbourne is the catalyst and host of a portfolio of bold projects that are moving Melbourne towards a regenerative future.
Kaj is also the Director of the Small Giants Academy Action Labs, where he leads the incubation and development of new initiatives. This has included the creation of Regen Melbourne, launching B Corporation in our region, bringing the School of Life to Australia and co-creating the Mastery of Business and Empathy and Impact Safari. He is a guide on a number of the SGA programs including Impact Safari Scandinavia: the Future of Cities.
A Civil Engineer by training, Kaj also holds a Masters of Economic History from Lund University.
Dr Troy Innocent
Dr Troy Innocent is an urban play scholar, artist gamemaker and Director of the future play lab at RMIT University in Narrm Melbourne.
Dr Troy InnocentNarrm, Melbourne
Dr Troy Innocent (he/they) is an urban play scholar, artist gamemaker and Director of the future play lab at RMIT University in Narrm Melbourne. The lab develops socially engaged and site responsive urban play connecting experimental game design, public space, posthuman methods, and creative technologies. Working with the city as a material, their approach to reworlding develops posthuman methods that reimagine, reconfigure and reconnect with the world. This involves transdisciplinary practices across design, sculpture, animation, sound, light and installation using methods of multiplatform storytelling that connect objects with their environment to build speculative worlds that playfully defamiliarise and disrupt urban life.
These worlds explore connections between language and reality, working with the affect of constructed aesthetic languages that traverse geometric abstraction and digital iconography, learned through play. Innocent has 25 years’ experience in gallery-based exhibitions, symposia and site-specific projects, developing augmented reality games that blend physical objects with digital interfaces to reimagine everyday urban environments in playful ways; situating his work in Aarhus, Melbourne, Bristol, Barcelona, Istanbul, Ogaki, Sydney, Tampere and Hong Kong. They are creator of 64 Ways of Being, an urban adventure platform combining audio walks and mixed realities to situate players in new experiences of place.
Nathan Scolaro
Nathan Scolaro
Nathan Scolaro is a Melbourne-based writer and editor who is passionate about the role language and stories play in shaping who we are and how we live.
For eight years he edited Dumbo Feather magazine, and was enthralled by stories that capture the depth and richness of people’s experience, outlook and work. He saw how powerful these stories were, not only for the listener or reader, but for the storytellers themselves: how enlivened they became articulating their sense of self, their purpose and their gift to the world.
Nathan has been working in publishing and journalism for nearly two decades, and wants to share his passion for meaningful storytelling, with like-minded and like-hearted folks.
TWIFSY Lunchbox Talk #1:
Futurama - the 4th Industrial Revolution
