Digital-Urban-Environments is a current research thread which argues that digital environments and urban environments have mirrors in respective digital/urban counterparts. This blending of the digital and urban leads to new situations for society and politics, as well as architecture. Works and collaborations include:
Island G: A Public Consultation
Pulau G is an artificial island constructed as part of a large scale land reclamation project on the north coast of Jakarta, Indonesia. Through various failures, its development as elite real estate is currently halted, leaving it as an awkward sandbank wasteland mostly visited by birds.
Despite (or rather in answer to) spiraling global debt and environmental turbulence, large real estate projects like the one intended for Island G are premised on high-risk, high-reward financial speculation, luring foreign investors with the promise of enormous capital gains.
Join Jorgen Doyle, Hannah Ekin, Alex Head, and Anna Kostreva (Wasteland Twinning Network), for a staged public consultation where they will perform the arguments of major (and fictional) stakeholders in the island’s future: opportunist artists speculating on new blockchain technology, International investors exploiting the digital and physical potentials of Indonesia’s coastline, Friends of the Earth and the Save Jakarta Bay Coalition, as well as real estate developers and the North Jakartan elite.
Watch here. Read my blog post about it.
A Third Landscape Perspective
Artists and urban researchers Anna Kostreva and Alex Head invite you to the concluding public talk of a three part series exploring the digital urban environment and communities of intent in Jakarta and Berlin. Featuring audio harvested from their work Alexa Goes to Jail in the show SUARA SUARA at the Jakarta History Museum and much much more!
Listen here.
informasi informal
An hour of new writing, scores of new recordings and improvised layering from Anna Kostreva and Alex Head. informasi informal attempts an intuitive reflection on two months of listening in Indonesia. Many thanks to ifa gallery Berlin, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Rujak Urban Studies Centre, Syfiatudina, Jorgen Doyle, Hannah Ekin, Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett.
Listen here. Read and see more reflections about an urban research walk along Jakarta's North Coast here.
Thank Goodness it’s Faraday!
Exploring the politics of our urban digital environment Anna Kosteva & Alex Head with guest material from Nicholas Mortimer: What Were You Expecting?
We’d like to present our work-in-progress about urban digital environments. Our artistic research practice is based on questioning, speculating, and provoking. We are interested in activities and constituencies that stimulate new ideas alongside creative affect.
We hope to engage the audience in a discussion about the ways in which the digital has become blended into material reality under the highbeams of surveillance capitalism. The presentation and discussion will help to lead into a forthcoming research trip to Indonesia, exploring communities of intent and the way that experience, desire, and subjectivity is manifested in direct proximity to digital technologies.
Listen here.