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Research Cluster 11 focuses on the digital as a way of thinking, an instrument for abstraction and a means of exploring. We shy away from the Boolean, true and/or false answers. We are generalists, using our computational literacy to navigate the spectrum between worlds and points of view. This year we examined urban environments through the lens of culture, seeing cities as places that are collectively imagined, created, maintained and inhabited by us – humans. We viewed the urban by looking at the cultural information that results from the activities and interactions that take place within. We initially explored from afar through articles, film, literature, music, paintings, performance, poetry, photography and theatre. The city was treated as a product of this cultural information, and we embraced its incomprehensibility by relating to it through the digital plenty – a seemingly infinite stream of elements. These elements and their collective plenitude provided us with an opportunity to relate to and understand the city on its own terms, from a boundless combination of perspectives. So, how do we relate to the vast media landscape through instruments of computation? Our aim is not to optimise, but to explore the continuity and infinity of what sits in between. We see space as uncountable and therefore infinite, yet the spaces we occupy are ultimately bound. They are bound not only by geometry but also by conventions and the narratives that inform them. We can compare this with the infinity that sits between two whole numbers. Even though everything in between one and two is bound by them, there is an infinite domain of numbers of a different nature (rational or real) between them.
In this fashion, we worked this year to develop the means to understand what kind of spaces we wanted to describe. We took culture to be that which occupies space: it can only take place in what is occupied by people. Space itself is not a geometrical entity – it is the backdrop where all activities take place. It is where we breathe, hear, speak, see, interact, pause, play, cry and rejoice.