As Tech Bros exert increasing influence over our society, urgent questions arise: How can we democratise digital technology? What does it mean to be human in this digital age? How can we harness digital technologies to promote our well-being and foster a just, healthy, and resilient society? For this edition of Back to School, we examine how digital technologies are reshaping the built environment, and how these transformations influence the ways we inhabit and experience it.
Through a series of public conversations, we explore the multiple scales at which today’s technological systems operate. From global power structures and geopolitical tensions to the spatial and cultural consequences of digital infrastructure, from hardware to images and visual culture.
Digital technologies are often presented as immaterial and inevitable. Yet behind the seamless experience of platforms, artificial intelligence, and networked devices lies a vast physical landscape of data centres, energy infrastructure, and resource extraction, as well as new forms of political power. These systems increasingly shape not only how cities function, but also how they are imagined, represented, and designed.
At the same time, architecture is becoming deeply entangled with contemporary image cultures. Buildings circulate as images before they are experienced as spaces, while digital visualisation tools, social media platforms, and algorithmic forms of mediation influence how environments are produced, consumed, and understood.
The same systems that shape how images circulate, how attention is captured, and how platforms govern perception are also reshaping territory through data centres, logistics networks, extraction, energy infrastructures, and new forms of political power. Architecture sits at the intersection of these material and visual dimensions.This lecture series wants to make these structures visible and open the conversation around this broad and urgent subject. By examining the relationships between power, representation, and space, we aim to develop a better and critical understanding of the (post)digital condition and encourage possibilities for imagining alternative futures.