Rice Seminar Public Lecture: "Rezoning New York City through Big Data" by Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Computation became a cognitive plateau for any subject of study, making computer science relevant across all disciplines. New technologies enable new means to describe reality, which as a consequence, activate new emerging disciplines. Digital signs represent information, and in linguistic terms, they determinate how we understand and reference reality. For instance, ecology has transformed many disciplines, but one of the most relevant displacements today has been the representational shift activated by computation in formalizing fluid dynamic simulation and processing Big Data. New digital techniques allow, for instance architects, to represent, analyze and manipulate fluid dynamic energy understanding now space as environment. Big data allow us to process large sources of information apparently before framing categorically what’s under question. But since information does not exists without a form of representation, the critical political issue resides in the relationship between data and representation, since Big Data is created through basic formulations in interfaces which gather fields of data using problematic schematic categories. Additionally. the moment any data is actualized, visualized and represented through an interface into manageable information, it will infer signification beyond its source and will challenge the same data it is indexing, activating a reflective loop between the politics of representation and an apparently inert reality. These issues will be discussed through the work of an architecture studio which proposes a rezoning of New York City in relation to environmental forces.

This lecture is part of the 2016-17 Rice seminar Lecture Series.