With a focus on human/computer relations, this conversation will explore how algorithms shape public spaces by eradicating the human experiences that define place. Equipping these processes, ever-new technological processes produce images that distance the built environment from the people who inhabit it. Drone photography, lidar scans, and satellite imagery capture the expansive, macroscopic view of the city, rendering its materiality through hyper-real images that leave its localised micro-histories buried below, out of sight, and pixelated at the street level. Through a fidelity to measurement, these technologies attempt to dematerialise the human body that contaminates the possibility of objectivity and precision. This conversation takes up this tension between the human and the algorithmic, investigating the subject through tactics that challenge the totalising perspectives of the algorithm to divulge a space seen from within, a landscape “anchored in human life, not something to look at but to live in” (Lefebvre 2007).

With support from the Embassy of Canada in Berlin.