Archaeology of Silicon2022
3D scanner assembly
Print on aluminum Dibond
45 x 30 cm.
How has the city been transformed within the framework of platform capitalism? What scenes emerge as emblematic of our digital age, unimaginable in another historical moment? How does digitalization reshape and redefine urban spaces that are now inhabited in entirely different ways?
Where the bench once served as a space for rest and leisure, it now operates as the workplace for the non-employees of a rapid delivery platform. Exposed to the elements, they wait for new orders to arrive through the app on their smartphones. If their bodies are drained, there’s a solution: caffeine and taurine loaded energy drinks provide the boost needed to pedal from McDonald's to your doorstep. Grocery stores, which once fostered social connections as neighborhood hubs, have become mere transit spaces for a quick recharge to endure the accelerated pace of digital life. Phone booths, now obsolete, stand as urban relics of a pre-digital era, haunting the streets like ghosts of a bygone time. The ground, as fluid as life in digitalized cities, seems to dissolve beneath the feet of those living in constant precarity.
Riders / Archaeology of Silicon offers a paradigmatic image of this new urban ecosystem. This image reflects on the labor, social, and urban transformations brought about by platform capitalism. Their bodies and technological devices form a system that upholds the immediacy and speed of contemporary digital life while simultaneously deepening precarious conditions.