(apropos cybernetics, society, urban planning - a parallel Greek case to
the chilean CyberSyn?)
Betreff: Onassis Stegi presents The Machine at the Heart of Man:
Constantinos Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism
Datum: Sat, 21 Jan 2023 11:00:07 +0000
Von: e-flux <i...@mailer.e-flux.com>
The Machine at the Heart of Man: Constantinos Doxiadis’ Informational
Modernism
An exhibition on data and human communities from the ’60s to today
January 28–February 26, 2023
Onassis Stegi
107 Syngrou Avenue
117 45 Athens
Greece
https://www.onassis.org
The exhibition examines one of the most pressing and transformational
conditions of the last half century—the overlapping and intertwining of
cities, people, and information systems. The exhibition shows this in
two episodes. The first covers the prescient use of computers in the
1960s by the Greek architect and internationally celebrated planner of
cities, Constantinos A. Doxiadis through the work of DACC—the Doxiadis
Associates Computer Center. The second episode traces these
computational practices to present day Athens, with new research into
the physical form, technical administration, and territorial spread of
city and state border management systems.
Each episode pivots around a population group and a form of information
collection. In the 1960s, Doxiadis Associates ran The Human Community ,
a DACC-assisted study of Athenian residents that gauged their adaptation
to the growth and pace of the postwar city. The exhibition includes The
New Human Community, a critical restaging of Doxiadis’ survey conducted
with recently arrived residents and refugees. The Machine at the Heart
of Man: Constantinos Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism tracks how our
contemporary and postwar periods are linked through techniques of data
extraction and accumulation. In the exhibition, these two episodes chart
Greece’s emerging informational geography, locating its boundaries,
borders, and the data subjects they engender.
With its mainframe UNIVAC and spinning tape drives, DACC was a startling
venture for an architecture office in the 1960s. Doxiadis belonged to a
cohort of international architects and intellectuals appraising the
implications of new digital technologies for the future of cities.
Unlike his peers, who often considered this impact abstractly or
theoretically, the techniques and products of computation were deeply
integrated into Doxiadis’ practice. Spanning early analog data
collection to later urban computation, the exhibition recasts Doxiadis’
practice through informational processes and automation, placing it
within the emerging postindustrial logics of the 1960s and 1970s.
The exhibition also puts the Doxiadis Associates Computer Center in
communication with our current debates on computation and community. For
Doxiadis, community was an ideal of social integration and resident
satisfaction. It was also a dynamic measure of urban scale seen via
neighborhood boundaries made volatile by postwar upheaval and migration.
For many residents of contemporary Athens, these local boundaries have
multiplied and expanded to encompass state borders and their control
systems. While The Human Community and DACC mark a pivotal early moment
in the historical formation and articulation of computational urbanism,
the information extraction technologies that appear at and through this
contemporary border complex are its most current elaboration.
Concept, research, curation, and design: Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Mark Wasiuta
Executive direction: Afroditi Panagiotakou, Prodromos Tsiavos
Commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi. Organized in partnership
with the Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives. With the support of the
Greek Council for Refugees and Melissa Network. And with additional
support from the Graham Foundation.
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