ADS8: Data Matter

Since its inception, ADS8 has attempted to formulate what a 21st-century institution of humans, other organisms, and machines could be and what would be its architecture, across both digital and physical realities, and everything that sits in between. Through the 2020/21 edition, we expanded this question to encompass the role that digital environments such as video games have assumed as alternative forms of collective sites, regulated by complex algorithmic architectures.

In 2021/22, ADS8 worked across a vast spectrum of the multiple forms through which data and, more broadly, digital environments manifest within the material world. As digital environments progressively become our social and political forums—creating new sites in which other forms of institution making, subjectivities, and ecological realities are tested—the studio expanded its investigation into those spatial forms where such environments are created and engineered.

The ultimate aim of the studio is to investigate a possible architectural agency in: (1) the way the material infrastructure of digital environments can be developed, explored, and manipulated, and how we can coexist and cooperate with other-than-human agents; (2) the way virtual arenas are utilised as testing grounds for new worlds, new institutions, new forms of restitution and representation.

With an expansive understanding of design, ADS8 aims to challenge conventional architectural representation in exploring and developing the practice led by each and every student over the course of the academic year.

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Kamil Hilmi Dalkir & Rhiarna Dhaliwal