Critical Modeling
Dissertation Project and Workshop Series
Digital shadows are cast on urban space, while Digital Twins mirror the city through 3D models, sensors, and simulation. Despite these metaphors’ dualism, such “twins” manifest as a multiplicity of things: A stand-in city to be hit by virtual disasters (we watch with fatal pleasure). Sometimes, a digital doppelgänger threatening to replace the real world. On occasion, a backup of urban areas that soon may be lost.
Urban modeling appears less as the abstract production of evidence, but as a situated mode of understanding and planning urban spaces, with its own histories, politics, and poetics. Inspired by Science Technology Studies and Cyberfeminism, this project focuses on the material and performative dimensions of urban modeling and investigates historical trajectories and power differentials inscribed into these activities. Through collaborative modeling experiments with local stakeholders, the project explores the speculative and hallucinatory potential of Urban Models.
Exercises in seeing double through bricolaged sensors and embodied data-making. Remixing layers of municipal data catalogs spanning from census data to everyday knowledge to formations on a geological timescale. Calculation as a mode of world-building and situated speculation. Experiments with agile and idiotic models of action.
A hybrid data-rama emerges from these modeling activities: a situated (Digital) Twin made of data, cardboard buildings, interactive simulations, and material diagrams. Instead of detached evidence, this model entangles multiple actors and lets them explore desirable and perilous urban scenarios.
Supervisors:
Prof. Frank Petzold (TUM, Chair of Architectural Informatics)
Prof. Ignacio Farìas (HU, Institute of European Ethnology)
Workshop Documentations: