+[Short Story, 2023] Dreams of Radical Connectedness
What are possible means for us as urbanites, students or urbanists to question and eventually challenge the smart governmentality of digitalizing cities? How can we produce a kind of collective resilience of reflection and critical attention? This project is an outcome of the "Urban No-Thing" studio course at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Winter 22/23. As a short story, it engages in multiple critical trajectories simultaneously and speculatively. It features a fictional scenario around the idea of cybernetically controlled urban "smartness". The idea is to create an immersive and imaginary space to test the implications of increasing digitalization in an urban setting. The story can be seen as a vehicle for critique that emerges from a space between imagination and theory, wherein the acts of reading and writing stories are inherently political. |