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The project looks at the territorial impact of emerging digital technologies across several scales through the lens of resolution. The media ecology enabled through these digital technologies does not manifest itself globally with the same density, both in terms of accessibility of infrastructure and degree of mediation. Resolution is an important measure of understanding our contemporary environment as it manifests itself in the interface between the physical and the digital, the material and the mediated. Digital information is fundamentally stored as discrete data, it represents information at a certain resolution. Resolution, in addition to a technical notion, can be understood as a spatial and temporal measure of density of information, with substantial political, economic, social and environmental implications. Resolution can be seen in horizontal territories, delineating borders between hires and lowres zones, as a technical limit of imaging and mapping and technologies. Resolution can be understood vertically in overlays of heterogeneous data sources, in the zoom-levels of digital mapping services. The project explores not only the extremes of connected and unconnected, mediated and unmediated, but is interested in the in-between, the territories where friction, confrontation manifest themselves, and we introduce resolution as means to describe the continuum territories in-between.
Media is shaping our territories. We are literally surrounded with media ecology. How can we imagine this invisible dimension of reality that is shaping our future?
The field guide is a preliminary study of exploring the relationship between territories and compression, listing how media technologies are reshaping the boundaries of existing territories.
Compression is therefore an important way of understanding contemporary media ecologies and our technology saturated environments.
The experiments look at resolution across dimensions from 2D to 3D to 4D as means of mapping and navigating Compressed City.
Through reconstructing and shifting boundaries, the compressed landscape mixes different resolutions into the same system, creating territories that go beyond the grid.
As digital representations become the predominant imagery that shapes routine experiences and understanding of the environments, the distinction between territories is becoming less apparent.
Resolution borders can be understood as a spatial and temporal measure of density of information, with substantial political, economic, social and environmental implications.
The compressed landscape, delineated from those borders, collapses the distinction between geopolitical or historical boundaries and the user’s own contrivances.
The most intuitive manifestation lies in visual clarity, and it can also indicate class differences in society, but the core idea is to represent the chaotic level of information.
Applying the core idea of resolution to the spatial order, it is possible to derive different resolutions on the level of architectural typology and urban morphology.
The urban morphology represented by the different resolutions are also topologically related to the different real-life business spaces, which together form the functional distribution of the compressed city.
The dense and disorganised information that constitutes the low-resolution space of the city is represented by elements such as the scattered buildings and the dazzling billboards that together represent chaos.
The stark contrast between the traditional gallery exhibition way and the digital avant-garde art shows a neutral attitude, both that a space is not just a single resolution, but a changeable process.
The superimposition of media elements such as billboards and green screens creates a media ecology in the compressed city. The high degree of media represents high resolution, while the material disorder shows low resolution.
The symmetrical layout, regular sequence and pure space represent a high degree of informative tidiness and an idealised spatial form, a high-resolution area in the city.