Nicolas Hausdorf: How does the State see? An urban-animatographical safari – gostujoče predavanje

If James C. Scott was right, modern urbanism is above all an imperative of legibility: the state, as a war machine, must decipher urban space in order to extract taxes and conscripts. Today, this legacy — what Shoshana Zuboff calls “Surveillance Capitalism” — is less about ideological control than about behavioral prediction and extraction.

This vision of state urbanism finds its most spectacular expression in planned smart cities such as The Line in NEOM: highly capitalized projects that centralize the imagination as the future of spectacle-driven urbanism. Yet, this gargantuan investment only scratches the surface, obscuring a variety of 20th- and 21st-century urban tendencies.

Arguably, beyond predictive surveillance, the city has always functioned as an animatographer, a soul-writer, where urban and architectural forms encode a cosmology. In this lecture, I will explore the baroque of internet-based informational warfare to speculate on the trajectories of contemporary urban form and the ways it enshrines an occult-materialist cosmos.

Nicolas Hausdorf je Melbournški raziskovalec in pisec. Njegova knjiga Superstructural Berlin je pri Založbi Sophia izšla pod naslovom Berlin ni Berlin, Ljubljana je Berlin. Predavanje bo v angleščini.