Hide & Seek

Most of the world human population lives in cities nowadays; we live in cities as commodities; cities are contemporary tools for/of consumption. Power structures treat us as consumers; social belonging and visibility is defined by one's own consumption power. Neoliberal urbanisation policies promote the free market and privatise the global and local doing and undoing of cities. The city is consumed and experienced as entertainment by those who can afford it, space becomes the privileged instrument for capital to unfold, to happen through the social realm. In the digitalized city, also citizens are commodified, becoming in turn the "privileged instrument" of capital by using “smart” tools' and allowing data extraction.

Hide & Seek is a project, supported by the Forecast Platform in the category Dissecting Technocapitalism , with mentorship led by Evgeny Morozov, which looks at mapping technologies, digital image production, and data collection processes to understand how surveillance systems and data-driven structures influence place-making, heritization and memory-building. In this way, the project asks how technology will affect the virtual imaginaries of future cities—and what kind of resistance could emerge to counter them.