Skin of Berlin
Research, Data Visualization + Film | Fall 2020 | critics: Bradley Cantrell, FAAR, + Michael Lee, FAARResearch partner - Somrita Bandyopadhyay
HISTORICAL RESEARCH - Schuttberg: Rubble Mountains of Berlin
Berlin is a physically stacked technopolis as urban graveyard, where the trace of its many past lives collages into a commemoration landscape to process collective trauma. Onto this landscape of memory, people project new and innovative notions of modernity, some flimsy and others long-lasting.
VISUALIZATIONS: surveillance camera density (left) and rate of policing (right), with yellow being hot spots.
Surveillance has defined this urban environment for centuries, from the invention of modern bureaucracy and national archives by a centralizing Prussian state, to the demilitarization of Weimar Germany and uneasy false peace, to the horrors of the SS regime during WWI and the Holocaust, to the disparate East and West German approaches to espionage during the Cold War, up to today’s IoT panopticon, with private Tech companies at the helm.
Our artistic and critical response is a thought experiment that we used as a vehicle through which to explore the experience of surveillance through consumer products.A speculative AI exploits the realm of the Haptic feeds users an immersive VR experience of a gamified Berlin, using haptic data to blur the lines between real and not real. This deepens the experience of mass surveillance beyond historical precedents, which relied on visual and auditory inputs.
People become avatars in a video game that takes the place of their real life, substituting artificial sensory stimuli for everyday happenstance. A number of products already exist that make the construction of a Haptic AI possible today.
