CFP: ARQ 118: Collectivity + New Media

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ARQ, a leading Latin American peer-reviewed journal of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design announces its Open Call for Papers and Projects for issue no. 118, titled "Collectivity + New Media." This is the third installment in an annual series exploring the potentials for collectivity across diverse programs, tools, and spaces. Preceded by the topics of "Housing" (issue no. 116; April 2024) and "Education" (issue no.117, to be published in August 2024), this issue aims to provoke critical reflections on the intersection of collective practices and new media technologies. 

 

ARQ 116: Collectivity + New Media 
In classical media theory, media are technical instruments or systems designed to deliver content. From smoke signals to the printing press, telephones to television, media connect the most points or the most people. Marshall McLuhan imagined that this technical network would give way to social interconnectedness in a “global village.” But McLuhan’s era was that of mass media, where a handful of messages were broadcasted to an audience. In today’s media landscape, where anyone can produce and transmit highly individualized content to millions of people simultaneously, the image of an interconnected community is challenged by echo chambers, deepfakes, and atomized realms of opinion on social media.

Media provides unparalleled access to architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, influencing their production, representation, and reception. Just compare the list of buildings you know with the ones you have visited. More than 30 years ago, Beatriz Colomina argued that “(…) modern architecture becomes modern by engaging with the media.” (1996:335). But how does this engagement manifest today?, how is media shaping contemporary architectural, landscape, and urban discourses? If TV antennas and radio towers were the urban symbols of mass media, new media is supported by a much less visible combination of computing power and digital infrastructure, deployed over the seabed and above the atmosphere.

But its supposed invisibility ends there. The “engines” of smart cities and AI are data centers, located in urban areas, which consume vast amounts of energy and water. The principle of maximum interconnectedness of media is intertwined today with the climate crisis, forcing us to consider the urban and environmental impacts of our current media landscape. These impacts are not limited to a building or typology; in the era of Big Data and automation, the built environment and public spaces are sources of information and data extraction. “Who” benefits from the use of this information and “why” are relevant questions to understand data systems in their urban and political context. As Shannon Mattern points out in her critique of smart cities, cities are more than information-processing machines; they harbor an “urban intelligence” that surpasses what can be quantified through sensors (2021:64-5).

Beyond the image of a passive receiver, media offer sites of resistance, organization and experimentation. Digital platforms, virtual and extended reality technologies, readily available through smartphones, can become tools of empowerment and bottom-up organization. This issue of the journal aims to critically reflect on the potential of these tools to foster collectivity, urging us to avoid blind faith in novelty for novelty’s sake. If the technical supports the social, how are digital technologies transforming the preservation of built heritage and collective memory?, How do they impact the public role of architects?, How do they influence how we build, care for, or inhabit collective spaces? We talk about “new” media, but this does not exclude re-readings of traditional media from the lens of the present.

References
Colomina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity. Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Woburn, MA: MIT Press, 1996[1994].
Mattern, Shannon. A City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge, 2001[1964].