Transindividual Urbanism: Novel Territories of Digital Participatory Practice

Like an omen, the advent of ubiquitous technologies has carried the general expectation for the emergence of new forms of collective authorship. Drawing on cybernetic theory of communication and on the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, the paper builds an ecological and materialist foundation to ideas of digital participation by presenting a discussion of Simondon’s L’individuation Psychique et Collective (1958). Here, the philosopher describes the individuation of the collective subject as an ontogenetic and metastatic process of psychological and affective events producing the Transindividual, thus offering a biological interpretation of the social process of becoming and a reconceptualization of ideas of knowledge and distribution of information. By opening the digital participatory scholarship to ecological and post-humanist theory, the paper intends to offer a better understanding of the complex nature of collective feedback, creating the potential for the affirmation of novel mediated urban narratives and aesthetics. These ideas are further explored through a design-research practice that uses biometric sensing, live data visualisation and generative design to investigate the aesthetical, technological and cultural dimension of Transindividuality as a model for collective authorship. The paper presents two projects, The HeartBit Walks and Affectual Infrastructures. These were designed as participatory events for larger event series in London, respectively the London Festival of Architecture 2018 and the E17 Art Trail 2019. Developed as a psychogeographic mapping event in Hackney Wick, The HeartBit Walks builds on previous methods developed by artist Christian Nold, investigating the use of biometric sensing (Galvanic Skin Response) and live data-visualisations for urban analysis. GSR information was gathered during short group walks and visualised during in-situ group discussions as situated dynamic animations, exploring the modes of reconfiguration of group knowledge through the experiential act of walking. The results were collected in a rich visual index that by rendering the diverse perspectives with granular definition offers a multi-scalar photography of the pedestrian mobility issues in the area. Drawing on the methods firstly explored in The HeartBit Walks, The Affectual Infrastructures project involved six environmental activists in the collection of environmental sound and GSR data at key locations in East London. The project attempts the detection of common sonic, spatial and emotional connections through the observation of data patterns at group level, exploring the metastatic formation of novel collective environmental awareness and the production of spatial configurations through multi-objective evaluation methods. The results inform a multi-media installation that, working as an adaptive network, releases at intervals the intertwined local sonic recordings, thus materialising for the public the intertwined situated experiences of the activists across space, time and individual identities. Within an ecological angle that places humans and their living and non-living co-species as the network of actors that collaboratively addresses the production of space, the Transindividual Urbanism project proposes biometric sensing as a tool for the systematic deconstruction of the human agency and the reimagination of platforms for group knowledge creation and collaborative decision-making. By constructing open archives of sensual collective knowledge and exploring generative mechanisms of real-time reflexive awareness, the project radically challenges previous conceived ideas of distributed authorship defining new trajectories of operation with the potential for radically reshaping the processes through which culture and places connect locally