Video recordings
A comprehensive collection of video recordings of all WE LIKE talks and discussions on platform urbanism
is available here:
Finissage
Speculations of the City: Reflections on Platform Urbanism
Vyjayanthi Rao and Pedro Gadanho in conversation with Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer
Saturday, 20 November 2021, 3 p.m.
City as Platform
Into the Black Box in conversation with Benj Gerdes and Giacomo-Maria Salerno
6 November 2021, 7 p.m.
Giudecca Art District, space One Contemporary Art, Giudecca 211-c, Venice
Intersectional Solidarity in Housing and Public Space
Ying-Tzu Lin (Slutty Urbanism), Gabu Heindl and Milagros Hurtig (Urban Femina) in conversation with Carmen Hines
28 October 2021, 3 p.m.
Data Materialities: Entanglement, Extraction, and the Future of Our Built Environments
Clare Lyster (Annex) in conversation with Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer
25 September 2021, 2 p.m.
Midissage
Exhibitors of the Austrian Pavilion Meet in Venice for Live Debates
28 August 2021, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Platform Austria - Midissage
Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, curators of Austria’s contribution PLATFORM AUSTRIA to the 17th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2021, cordially invite you to their midissage talks on Saturday, 28 August 2021.
Platform Austria satellite in Vienna
28 May - 29 August 2021
For visitors from Austria who, due to the current pandemic, are unable or do not wish to travel to Venice during the Biennale Architettura 2021, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer are organising an accompanying exhibition in the MAK FORUM (Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna.
Virtual Opening Platform Austria
Thursday, 20 May 2021, 7 p.m., online
A summary of the opening ceremonies of the Austrian Pavilion can be found here:
Opening of the Austrian Pavilion in Venice
The official opening of the Austrian pavilion will take place during the preview days on 20 May 2021, 3 p.m., at the Giardini della Biennale in Venice.
→ www.platform-austria.org
PRESS CONFERENCE
20 May 2021, 1 p.m.
Accreditation: www.labiennale.org/en/press
Into the Black Box
The platforming process sees planetary urbanization as its terrain of action and its primary source. While oil and gas platforms extract the raw materials offshore and from the underground, digital platforms extract their raw material (data) inland and from the foreground.
Platforms are the quintessential of the “industrial revolution 4.0”. They represent the iridescent assemblage of path breaking and ground breaking emerging forms of production, distribution, and consumption. Platforms are a complex ecology of labour-force, technologies and environments. Platforms, as well as technology in general, are not neutral, and their use is decided in social and political struggles.
Matias Viegener
If the internet is everything now, friend and parent, if the internet is the world, what of privacy? Privacy has always been defined spatially, on the distinction between the bedroom and the street, the home and the public square. Definitions of privacy run parallel to debates between the needs of the individual in opposition to the necessities of the collective. More importantly here, privacy is also conceived in relation to property, of which there are conventionally two forms: physical, our homes, our money, our luggage, and intangible, of which copyright and intellectual property are an example. Civil society, police authority, and democratic polity are balanced on these articulations. These concepts fall short with the rise of personal data that can be bought or sold or infringed upon. This is the site of the great battle of our time.
Gabu Heindl
Platform capitalism is invading every part of the homes: service platforms of care manage cleaning, nannies, home-shopping, and much more. Platforms such as Helpling render visible the need for cleaning by selling the commodity of a cleaning package, while the cleaners themselves are invisibilised (until they enter your apartment – where you don't have to be present when the cleaning package is being delivered). Platforms are maintained by invisibilised labour, much like capitalism always has been, thus the platformisation of housing issues does not eliminate but rather intensifies existing injustices and exclusions. The persons affected by real-estate platform capitalism usually experience inequalities resulting from issues of race, gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status, which often intersect.
Tom Avermaete
The logistics of platform urbanism can only exist because of a vast human labour force, which remains mostly hidden to the everyday citizen. These are the people who work in the many transport and distribution centres or operate the numerous vehicles that connect the distribution nodes of platform commerce. Cities have always been places where labour relations and conditions have been contested, debated and negotiated. The history of urbanism is larded with labour protests, union actions and negotiations, as well as with collective investments in the conditions and places of work. Platform urbanism should connect its commercial and its political tenets, so as to secure that the people who produce the ‘platform city’ become, and remain, the subject of public concern.
Benj Gerdes
Here’s a fun experiment: try asking someone in an affluent neighbourhood to borrow their smartphone to make a phone call or to check something on a map. I am betting it is difficult to find someone willing to share.
I think my own attachment to a device is problematic, that I would be perhaps momentarily unwilling to share or at least initially a bit suspicious. What does it say about a resource that is operated visibility in shared urban space, widely held, that its operators are unwilling to share, primarily due to attachment or personification? I suspect this unwillingness to share has nothing to do with scarcity and more to do with our relationship to expressions and mobilisations of personhood via network and by extension, the devices for access.
Vyjayanthi Rao
Platform is everywhere though paradoxically attempts to be nowhere, silent and invisible. In the dead of a snowy winter’s night, platform makes its appearance on the wheels of a deliveryman’s electric bicycle. Sliding across on snowy streets, making as little noise as possible, platform attempts to slither around without creating friction, connecting users to providers, buyers to sellers, organising transactions and exchanges all the while extracting and accumulating rents and other values.
Surfing on virtual waves within a digital sea, platform appears and disappears from view. Yet even through this noise, one hears and sees eruptions everywhere, large and small. Congregations, gatherings, assemblies, congeries – of objects, sites and groups that deliver the virtual into the physical. For the sake of provocation, I want to rethink platform as a stage upon which exchanges can produce different value forms, ones rooted in life rather than as part of an apparatus or machine.
Leo Hollis
The places of our everyday lives have become socio-technical spaces, urban platforms in which code, space and bodies are intertwined. The infrastructure of our daily rituals has become mediated, often without our knowledge or our permission. It is also increasingly invisible, so that the membranes between the online and offline worlds are no longer perceived. This is a frictionless space where we efficiently go about our business without fear of glitches or interference.
This is the end dream of developers like the visionary Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC who hoped that “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”.
Fairwork Project
The term platform is both a façade and a misnomer.
If we believe that hard-won labour protections are outdated in a world of apps, we make way for the degradation of working conditions.
This is not what a platform should be.
This is not what a platform should do.
This is not what a platform has been.
This is not what a platform will be.
Yet the term platform is also a promise. A promise to democratise exchange and empower; a promise to be a neutral mediator; a promise of frictionlessness.
A promise of fair pay.
A promise of fair conditions.
A promise of fair contracts.
A promise of fair management.
A promise of fair representation.
We own the future—as workers, unions, platforms, regulators and activists. The first step to change the trajectories of platform urbanism is to change the discourses around it. Only then can we begin to bring an alternative into being.
Ofri Cnaani
The distance between my yawn and your clapping goes through Zoom’s voice recognition.
The distance between your touchscreen and my fingers is 30 megabits per second if I sit in this room.
The distance between Evann’s words in Vancouver travels on the submarine cable, from English Bay to the Panama Canal, the Gulf of Mexico, before it crosses the Atlantic Ocean.
The distance between my typing fingers and the Vodafone servers is 5,689 tears and two swallows.
The distance between sleep pattern and your watch goes through your Amazon shopping cart.
The distance between my lips and my next text message goes through Apple face recognition algorithm and a smile.
Owen Hatherley
When I was asked to participate in something on 'platform urbanism', my main reaction was to get out my mobile telephone. Here it is – a now-antiquated non-smart phone, on which I can make and answer calls, receive text messages, and if so inclined play Snake – and nothing else.
It's the kind of phone that gets called a 'burner', an untraceable, discardable contract-free contraption of the sort allegedly favoured by terrorists and drug dealers. I am, therefore, quite possibly the least suitable person to take part in anything devoted to apps, smart cities or anything connected to these, because as much as is humanly possible, I do not use them.
This is not because I've somehow managed to separate myself from the demands of social media, being constantly 'on' and at work, and the outrage cycles and wormholes of the internet – on the contrary, it's because of the fact I am deeply addicted to all of these that I do not have a smartphone.