Part of my contribution to CI’Num, the text of my presentation:

Aliens in Spaces

Neo-nomads move from automats to hotel rooms, and transit in these “non-places” defined by Marc Augé. For someone always on the move, changing cultural setting every now and then, even if the hotel room is the same everywhere, definitely affects the way he/she relates to his community of friend and family, and the way he or she “Adheres”—using the word of George Amar—to space.

As mobile infrastructures expand, and ubiquitous computing proliferates, the transit of what Asher calls PIG, “People, Information and Goods” accelerates, globalization propagates, and spaces acquire a monotonous aspect, relegate traditional urban settings, and denies access to whom does not possess the information.

Because of these increasingly happening scenarios and as technologies puncture bodies and space different problems of identities arise. First the schizophrenic self learns to detach from any belonging to a specific nation, or paradoxically exacerbate an invented identity. Then the chip encapsulating personal information and implanted under the skin reattaches the neo-nomad to space, as he/she is, all of a sudden, traceable in the urban environment. Yet, the two dimensional codes tattooed on his or her skin surface ties him or her to virtual spaces and selves…

One can at length invent and reinvent an identity, thus escape control. However, body wear, portable and connecting devices enable neo-nomads to belong to many communities, sometime overlapping. Hence mental geographies couple physical territories. The same wear, portable and connecting devices link people and building skins together. Experiments like the Vectorial Elevation, Relational Architecture 4 by Raphael Lozano-Hemmer (users could log in and change via the web the lighting configuration of the plaza) and the Kunsthaus building of the architect Peter Cook are strongly demonstrating how technologies extends the skin of the building, that it is not people who adapt to space anymore but very much the contrary.

These are examples of the role people could play in the making of public space and architecture. Beyond the skin of the building, the inserted automat has a depth and rely on heavy infrastructure, be it information about stocks or road access and back room for maintenance. Hence the inflated space of the building skin relates to another layer of architecture, an meta-architecture of storage space.

Did show work in progress the FLASHback digital wallpaper to be applied in conjonction with my Hotel Room project.