Abstract Summary
The post-internet era encapsulates a time where the internet, in its myriad facets including perception, influence, fragmentation, polarization, disruption, accelerationism, and speculation, shapes the milieu of the extreme present. This paper delves into the paradigm of post-internet time and its profound impact on urban and architectural experiences. This period witnesses the influence of internet microgenres and subcultures on the aesthetic, form, and relational structures within city architecture. Notably, technologies such as the semantic web, blockchain, and digital ownership intertwine with political, cultural, and economic realities, exerting a multiplicative effect on combinatorial innovation. The concept of the Post-Internet City underscores the coalescence of virtual and physical realms, where technological interfaces merge with social and cultural interfaces. This reality transcends mere extraction and mediation of technology, presenting an imperious yet inconspicuous virtual presence that impacts urban infrastructure profoundly. The paper focuses on the convergence, interweaving, and tensions between physical urban spaces, their digital counterparts, and technological overlays. It examines design-research initiatives that explore the intricate interactions stemming from an increasingly interconnected world, contemplating the influence of social media, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and surveillance on urban form and behaviour. Central to this exploration is the query: How does architecture and the city respond to, enable, or counterbalance the effects of technology? Speculating on a potential domain of urban and architectural invention, the paper envisions cities transcending cadastral space to embrace virtual realms and digital ubiquity. It scrutinizes the hyper-reality of virtual space as a nexus for invisible societal, economic, and cultural forces. Moreover, the research postulates trajectories where technological shifts manifest within the urban process, crystallizing in architectural practice. The investigative studio operates at the nexus of physical, virtual, and holographic realms, leveraging real-time urban data analytics, simulation, gamification, AI, and generative techniques. The theoretical framework posits Post-Internet Cities as kinetic processes fostered by data, energy, people, and logistics. It advocates for a spatial operating system that challenges chronological urbanism, overturning traditional static principles in favour of an opportunistic, agile, and multiplier-based approach. This temporal city embraces complexity, variability, unpredictability, and imbalance as catalysts for accelerated change and innovation. The research and projects utilise static and real-time urban data analytics, techniques of data scrapping from web-based APIs and platform technology applications, hybridising datasets, to build operative urban models and generative scenarios, visualisations, and propositions for the city.
