Remembrance Archives

The article proposes a reflection on the design role and a speculative project about the topic of temporality in the digital city. The notion of socio-technical system (Whitworth 2009) is used to show how in a society characterized by high technological density the city model could approach the one of a factory (Armando & Durbiano 2019). In a socio-technical system the capillarity of the interactions between men and machines is central in beating the rhythm of the subjects’ behaviors acting its space. Furthermore in the contemporary landscape the analytics systems producing predictions introduce an additional temporal layer (Hansen 2015) used as a filter to read and design these behaviors (Pentland 2019) and the city planning. Artificial intelligences, synthesizing the data harvested, produce precognition simulating behaviors in the digital in order to anticipate them in the analogical. It is claimed that within these temporal loops only an incremental optimization is possible and that to design exclusively through this filter could cause a folding of time that would lead the city to live in a temporal bubble, whereas the city lives on many different temporal lines contributing to the imagination and to the collective memory (Gregotti 1966). Therefore design has to address this challenge bringing the question of the memory at the project's center (Zannoni 2018). A speculative project called Remembrance Archives is proposed. Remembrance Archives aims to hack the temporal bubble by the injection of data drawn from the past of the city history that will alter the regular output of the artificial intelligence predictive models in unexpected ways, practicing an actual work of remembrance through which people will interact with the city memories as a source of new meanings and imaginary