<nettime> Fwd: The Machine at the Heart of Man: Constantinos Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

(apropos cybernetics, society, urban planning - a parallel Greek case to 
the chilean CyberSyn?)


Betreff: 	Onassis Stegi presents The Machine at the Heart of Man: 
Constantinos Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism
Datum: 	Sat, 21 Jan 2023 11:00:07 +0000
Von: 	e-flux <info@mailer.e-flux.com>


The Machine at the Heart of Man: Constantinos Doxiadis’ Informational 
Modernism

An exhibition on data and human communities from the ’60s to today

January 28–February 26, 2023

Onassis Stegi
107 Syngrou Avenue
117 45 Athens
Greece

https://www.onassis.org

The exhibition examines one of the most pressing and transformational 
conditions of the last half century—the overlapping and intertwining of 
cities, people, and information systems. The exhibition shows this in 
two episodes. The first covers the prescient use of computers in the 
1960s by the Greek architect and internationally celebrated planner of 
cities, Constantinos A. Doxiadis through the work of DACC—the Doxiadis 
Associates Computer Center. The second episode traces these 
computational practices to present day Athens, with new research into 
the physical form, technical administration, and territorial spread of 
city and state border management systems.

Each episode pivots around a population group and a form of information 
collection. In the 1960s, Doxiadis Associates ran The Human Community , 
a DACC-assisted study of Athenian residents that gauged their adaptation 
to the growth and pace of the postwar city. The exhibition includes The 
New Human Community, a critical restaging of Doxiadis’ survey conducted 
with recently arrived residents and refugees. The Machine at the Heart 
of Man: Constantinos Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism tracks how our 
contemporary and postwar periods are linked through techniques of data 
extraction and accumulation. In the exhibition, these two episodes chart 
Greece’s emerging informational geography, locating its boundaries, 
borders, and the data subjects they engender.

With its mainframe UNIVAC and spinning tape drives, DACC was a startling 
venture for an architecture office in the 1960s. Doxiadis belonged to a 
cohort of international architects and intellectuals appraising the 
implications of new digital technologies for the future of cities. 
Unlike his peers, who often considered this impact abstractly or 
theoretically, the techniques and products of computation were deeply 
integrated into Doxiadis’ practice. Spanning early analog data 
collection to later urban computation, the exhibition recasts Doxiadis’ 
practice through informational processes and automation, placing it 
within the emerging postindustrial logics of the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibition also puts the Doxiadis Associates Computer Center in 
communication with our current debates on computation and community. For 
Doxiadis, community was an ideal of social integration and resident 
satisfaction. It was also a dynamic measure of urban scale seen via 
neighborhood boundaries made volatile by postwar upheaval and migration. 
For many residents of contemporary Athens, these local boundaries have 
multiplied and expanded to encompass state borders and their control 
systems. While The Human Community and DACC mark a pivotal early moment 
in the historical formation and articulation of computational urbanism, 
the information extraction technologies that appear at and through this 
contemporary border complex are its most current elaboration.

Concept, research, curation, and design: Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Mark Wasiuta

Executive direction: Afroditi Panagiotakou, Prodromos Tsiavos

Commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi. Organized in partnership 
with the Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives. With the support of the 
Greek Council for Refugees and Melissa Network. And with additional 
support from the Graham Foundation.
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