Post-Apocalypse Smart City Desert, 2018-2019

Ploeger, Dani
© Dani Ploeger

The Smart City has become a new utopia. Visions of urban spaces that are digitally monitored and navigated in a near-totalizing fashion are presented as a way to perfect everyday life in line with consumer culture’s key tropes of innovation, efficiency, and endless growth.

Post-Apocalypse Smart City Desert is a prototype for an alternate type of smart city. Instead of optimizing processes, it utilizes digital technology for catastrophic doomsaying in the sense of philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s writing.

Appropriating the QR code as an iconic element of smart cities, it connects trash cans – mundane and often unappreciated artifacts of everyday public space – to a digital space that hints at a post-apocalyptic scenario: After land has degraded into arid plains, trash cans remain in the sand as banal reminders of the inevitable materiality of consumerism.

Shown at Seasons of Media Arts – City of Participative Visions (2019).

Time: 08.08.2019 – 15.09.2019

Location: Europaplatz

Seasons of media arts 2019

Seasons of Media Arts 2019 – City of Participative Visions

08. August 2019 — 15. September 2019