On the other hand, there is something that the city itself does to time. The persistence that the city guarantees and imposes on architectural structures does not merely alter their nature: it actually transfigures the substance and appearance, the meaning and form of existence of time itself. First and foremost, because of the city, the past ceases to be a purely psychological and immaterial memory and becomes not only a reality of stone, brick, steel, and glass, but also\u2014and above all\u2014a space within which we move and live: the city transforms time into space, inhabited space, and space that speaks (scenographic). On the other hand, since the stone and metal fabric of the past in the city is usually the same as that of the present and the future, time and the various times seem to be distinguished in the city only as different signs: if time becomes space, space in the city\u2014as has been said\u2014is merely a sign; therefore, time, too, is merely a linguistic, scenographic fact. To put it technically, one might say that the city thus compels time to become theater, and the past to exist only as a sign and a scenic setting rather than as an event. Theater should be understood here not only as a space of representation, but as that particular mechanism that allows what appears to be an entrance, like an actor taking the stage, to enact history in some way. Precisely because it is a sign and not an event, the past can act and repeat itself infinitely in the city. And conversely, precisely because it is part of the fabric of daily life, it never ceases to be composed and recomposed in different ways. It never stops rewriting itself.<\/p>\n
Rossi\u2019s arguments found an echo at exactly the same time in Venturi\u2019s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.9 The work presents itself as a treatise on architectural rhetoric that, in opposition to the tabula rasa approach and the stylistic monoculture of modernism, advocates the need to embrace all forms of the past in the name of the ideal \u201cof a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience.\u201d10 Following T. S. Eliot, Venturi argues that one cannot truly be modern while ignoring tradition. For this reason, he does not reject modernity, but seeks to reconcile it with the past and with everything that does not fit within its strictest principles. This is not a return to nineteenth-century eclecticism: the need for this inclusion of different eras in the contemporary city does not stem from a rejection of the present or from an aesthetic stance. It is the acceptance of the richness of modern life that makes it necessary to articulate a different relationship to the past: \u201cthe complexity and contradiction that develops from the program and reflects the inherent complexities and contradictions of living.\u201d The book is one of the most profound reflections on the idea of ambiguity, in a political, semantic, and artistic sense. Ambiguity\u2014or, as Venturi often repeats, the logic of \u201cboth-and\u201d\u2014is a tool for maximalist inclusion and the universalization of the contemporary city. Only insofar as it is ambiguous\u2014that is, capable of embracing all eras\u2014can the city open itself to the future without losing its strength and its nature.<\/p>\n
But as is often the case with significant books, the most critical idea remains implicit. If the work establishes and analyzes with extreme rigor what might be called the rhetoric of the contemporary city, it is because it starts from the premise that history is a purely rhetorical phenomenon. On the one hand, the various forms of the past are rhetorical figures, as are the attempts at reconciliation in our times (that is, history itself); on the other hand, the coexistence of times (that is, history) is not a matter of chronology but a matter of harmony, in other words, a matter of composition. Because it is itself a rhetorical fact, and because eras are composed in a rhetorical manner, the past can be composed, just as the present and the future are. Once again, history is not a fact; it is a style. The city makes it impossible to separate oneself materially and semantically from the past; in other words, it opens history up to a continuous material and symbolic rewriting. To put it another way, a city is a place where the archive (the past) can never be protected from the present performance.<\/p>\n
Earlier attempts to consider the relation between digital technology and urban life were necessarily framed by a different historical situation. During the nineties, when computation, electronic communication, and the internet were still emerging as distinct and relatively unfamiliar environments, the question was generally posed in terms of an encounter between two separate bodies: the built, material, historically sedimented city on the one hand, and the new domains of information, simulation, and virtual communication on the other. The figures of the cyborg, the hybrid, the cybercity, or William J. Mitchell\u2019s \u201cultrabodies\u201d\u2014in different ways present in the work of Antoine Picon, M. Christine Boyer, and Mitchell\u2014registered the novelty of that encounter, but at the same time preserved its underlying dualism. The digital remained, in these accounts, an addition, invasion, deformation, or dematerialization of an otherwise autonomous urban reality.<\/p>\n
This framework was historically understandable, and it produced important insights. Yet it now seems inadequate. The issue is no longer how a technological system intersects with the built and lived world, nor how bodies might become hybridized with machines. Platforms are themselves architectural artefacts in the proper sense of the word. They are not additions to cities; they are now a form of city in which people live\u2014more people live in these cities than in any other. They distill the basic condition of urban life as understood by Rossi and Venturi\u2014the constant performative interweaving of the past and the present.<\/p>\n
In digital platforms, language does not circulate through a pre-existing space; it produces the space in which it circulates. Platforms construct a common environment by determining what appears together, what can be connected, what remains visible, and what returns from the past. We are thus confronted with a city whose streets are paths between statements, whose monuments are reactivated archives, and whose institutions are the technical procedures that govern relevance, memory, and public appearance.<\/p>\n
This is why in social media or in AI platforms archive and performance can no longer be separated. Every performance is immediately recorded, indexed, measured, and made available for future retrieval; every archival trace can be reactivated as a present intervention, detached from its original context and inserted into a new conflict. The digital city is a permanent present made of recoverable pasts. Once language becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure becomes the condition of public speech, we must learn to recognize platforms for what they are: cities. And, like every city, they must be reclaimed as spaces of collective life\u2014freed from the purely privatized regimes that presently govern their access, visibility, memory, and the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the other hand, there is something that the city itself does to time. The persistence that the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-360832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}