ARC 597 | BLOW-UP Scale, Spectacle, and Spontaneity in Architecture

The film ‘Powers of Ten’ can be easily put as a summation for essays by Laura Kurgan, Benjamin Bratton’s Cloud Megastructures and Platform Utopia ‘edited by Jordon Geiger, the essays – Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft, Niagora and lastly Rem Koolhaas’s Bigness. Infact, although the film was made way back in 1977 by the Eames, it aptly points out the worldly scale and the network that seemingly links all the layers that constitute this big world. The movie illustrates the ideology of stitching various technologies together in order to interpret the relative terminology of scale with exploration of Universe and Space. The comprehension of scale of technologies on a global paradigm is elucidated through planetary computing in the readings. The articles are further linked with space and media which are global phenomenon.

The author in Representations and the Necessity of Interpretation principally talks about the satellite networks which help generate imagery of our planet earth. Moreover she also explains that this data delivered to the public is filtered by experts for surveillance and the delivered data need not be rightly interpreted by the users. This is when she also highlights the representations of this data should be supported with certain kind of toolsets which help user interpret the data in a better manner. Resonating the same data network which is primarily derived, listed, counted and linked to our physical and digital address potentially then becomes the spatial data which mapped. Bratton interprets this data on an even wider phenomenon and puts it as cloud megastructures which is an agglomeration of our physical and technological world. Cities are embedded with technologies and these layers of cities form stack or the cloud network. The cloud network in the physical when contained create dystopian platform cities. The scale of technologies hovers over the world form cloud megastructures.