Tactics&Practice #14: Scale
Farzin Lotfi-Jam: Scales of Realtime
May 28 2023
Realtime. The dream vision of technocratic management. A state of total omniscience, where what is known and how it is known is flattened onto the glistening surface of the computer screen. Encapsulating a suite of technologies, doctrines and desires, the realtime paradigm is a response to consumer demands for convenience and speed as much as it is a reaction to government and corporate appetites for rich and frequent renderings of information.
Lotfi-Jam locates the paradigm’s long history of technological control and capitalisation by examining realtime innovations in applications such as military strikes and asset tracking. He notes that realtime is not just about deploying speed to minimise costs and increase margins, but a strategy for an emerging market of experiences. New human-to-machine interfaces allow for more intuitive interactions with spatial information and digital processes; from the scale of the smart city, where computational systems regulate movement, to the optimised home, where technologies of efficiency and monitoring produce informational subjects. This lecture lays out the consequences of these multiscalar realtimes and outlines the blind spots of supposedly all-immersive, all-seeing technical systems, showing how such systems foreclose urban futures outside the purview of military, security and financial motives.
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2023
For the series:
Tactics&Practice
V okviru:
konS ≡ Platforma za sodobno raziskovalno umetnost
Photo: Blaž Gutman / MGML
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In the framework of konS ≡ Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art, a project chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres” co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.