ADS8: Data Matter: Digital Networks, Data Centres & Posthuman Institutions
Kamola Askarova
This year at the Royal College, with ADS8, her thesis project investigates the effects of digital consumption habits, the social and political consequences of the gamification of everyday life, and the subsequent spatial implications.
Kamola's first-year project explores the impact of emerging technologies on democratic systems interrogated through critical design with ADS4. She was also part of a live research group project in partnership with British Land focused on speculating the future of retail through the lens of automation.
This year, as the world has been closing off physical spaces, we have turned to inhabit digital spaces for information, interaction and entertainment. As a consequence, our relationship with the digital realm has dramatically changed, our habits warped and our consumption of data intensified.
Today, one in three of us play interactive games. The virtual spaces we create are a reflection of the shifting challenges we face in society. Ideologies originated from gaming are having an increasingly influential role in the way our reality is structured. People who spend time in virtual worlds exist in a complex paradox of living in neither the physical nor the digital world in full while using resources in order to live in both to the extreme. We live between the two realms of reality, as the digital world is seen as a disembodied place existing in cyberspace. Gaming processes have become an operational platform for everyday life. The notion of 'play', once associated with the sphere of leisure activities, has been taken up as a strategy for success in consumer markets and used as a tool for sinister political agendas.
Still Life: Digital Obesity
Still Life: Digital Deprivation
Through an investigation of game elements and a critical exploration of aesthetics used within virtual space, the project draws attention to the current condition of digital consumption habits that have become a symptom of opaque political and corporate agendas. Playing Consumption proposes a design strategy for a new health prescription service that aims to address how we consume digital information and subsequently how we inhabit virtual space. As a result, an interactive architecture emerges to encourage self-regulation and collective agency within the digital spaces we inhabit every day.
A series of playful virtual spaces: the Pixel Platform, the Fortuitous Forest, the Attention Arena & the Data Diner serve as an antithesis to compensation strategies set out to vilify digital interaction by placing emphasis on balance.