Moderator: Clemens Apprich

With Felipe Fonseca, Marleen Stikker, Karl Heinz Jeron, Mathias Fuchs

"Remixing Digital Cities" explores the concept of digital cities and alternative urban networks in Europe and Brazil. In Berlin, Amsterdam and elsewhere, "digital cities" were founded in the 1990s to provide Internet access and address both the promises and risks of recently built network technologies. At the center of this discussion was the idea of using these technologies as experimental playgrounds for new forms of cooperation and networking. In contrast, Brazilian cities today are facing a new threat, as urban assets and IT-protocols are being merged with "smarter cities" such as the one IBM implemented in Rio de Janeiro. By bringing together such divergent experiments, we will scrutinize some of the cultural practices that have been associated with digital cities in order to critically investigate current modes of interaction. In this sense, the digital city not only represents a spatial metaphor through which to structure cyberspace, but it can also be seen as a background to new regimes of control.