DDes Conference 2024: RealTimeNature | Scales of RealTime, Farzin Lofti-Jam

The earliest duck decoys, found in Ancient Egypt, were often live herons bound to ships, their presence tempting wild waterfowl to killing distance. Birds today are suspicious of their lifeless decoy counterparts, so modern versions have begun to use sensors to mimic natural movement, blurring the artificial and real. If sensors in a decoy help it mimic kin, in turn luring an animal to its death, what might it mean for an environment to use sensors in an attempt to mimic its “natural” state?

RealTimeNature brings together a diverse group of thinkers to discuss the promises and perils of environmental simulation, remote sensing, and real-time synchronizations. In the context of the current “ontological turn,” which responds to the ecological crisis resulting from modernity, RealTimeNature takes into account the philosopher Yuk Hui’s observation that the focus on nature and the non-human in this movement often overlooks questions related to technology.

Through a set of public dialogs and keynote lectures, RealTimeNature poses these questions: What happens when we consider technology as a universal fix, and how does this impact our understanding of space and time? Can we reimagine technology not as a universal concept, but as a diverse multitude?

Farzin Lotfi-Jam is an architect whose work explores the politics of technology and cities. He is an assistant professor in architecture at Cornell University where he directs the Realtime Urbanism Lab. The lab uses and invents new spatial media and technologies to visualize and simulate how algorithms, models, and notions of ”real time” govern urban life. He is also director of Farzin Farzin, an interdisciplinary design studio working across architecture, urbanism, computation, and media. From modeling the control matrices of smart cities to spatializing the cultural logics of social media, his individual and collaborative projects are research based and multimediatic.

0:00 Introduction by Annie Simpson
1:54 Presentation by Farzin Lofti-Jam