Post-Digital Architecture

Jakub Kopec

The term “post-digital” refers to the apparently disordered current situation where most human activity is affected by computerization and digitization. Post-digital is not the antithesis to digital in the way postmodern was to modern, it’s not its renouncement, nor is it a comeback of the analog. It’s an informed (critical), creative continuation of the digital in the hybrid space of collaboration between machine and human, digital and analog, communication and material, global and local, generic and specific, high and low, developed and developing, industrially manufactured and DIY.
This issue of the magazine tries to reflect what the term “post-digital” could mean in architecture. It illustrates the range of possibilities of contemporary architectural thinking, its relation to social, cultural and political situations, education and research, up to the speculative practices at the edge of what can still be perceived as architecture and where architectural means start to be used with a different intent. The essays and interviews in this issue contextualize digital technology and political agenda, reveal infrastructural logic of large digital platforms, approach media from a material perspective and architecture from a media perspective, or observe how computer technology and artificial intelligence influence contemporary performance design and lead to the founding of new disciplines in the humanities. A selection of projects with authorial comments mirroring the multiplicity of architectural approaches fill the niches between the texts – from academic research projects and examples of speculative practice, to overlaps into other professions. The outputs includes objects, installations and scenographies, machine learning and robotics projects, or software development and documentation of events.