Vol. 10 (2021): LINKS | Physical, Virtual, Digital

AGATHÓN issue number 10 is a collection of essays, studies, research and projects on Links | Physical, Virtual and Digital to investigate the profound and widespread transition that combines dichotomies (analogue and digital), enhances oxymorons (artificial intelligence), overturns axioms (ubiquity), creates paradoxes (intangible materiality) by involving, without distinction, architecture, humanities and social science, anthropology, sociology, ecology, biology, physical-mathematical sciences and neuroscience whose impacts will become even more clear in the medium and long term. Although they are currently visible and accelerated in part by the global health emergency. A certainly ‘digital’ transformation, which scholars such as Floridi (2020), and Galimberti (2020), but also Haraway (2018), Searle (2017) and Chomsky (2011) have placed above all on an ontological and epistemological level as it involves the essence of ‘things’, the way we define them, the world around us and in particular our relationship with the elements that constitute it.
Physic/material and history of forms today become virtual reality by mixing in the immaterial stream of networks and deterritorialized flows: the digital world ‘opens’ by connecting (delocalizing) and ‘confines’, enclosing (self-sufficient city), but above all, it ‘induces’ new spatial configurations in a constantly evolving relationship between genius loci and shape, function and flexibility of use, between the ‘Vitruvian’ Man, in his physical proportions, and the ‘inforg’ man who lives, works and relates to the contemporaneity of simultaneously physical, virtual and digital places. A space that, as an ontological entity – natural, built, joint, open, secured, connected, residual, interstitial, on a macro, micro or nanoscale and, no matter if we are talking about surfaces, volumes, thresholds, technical-construction/plant components and objects – in any form (from landscape to territory, from infrastructures to cities, from buildings to objects, up to systems, components and materials) clarifies Connections: Physical, in the single material, analogical and tangible object; Virtual in configuring experiences of augmented and immersive reality; Digital in interacting and implementing new creative and communicative processes, and technical at the same time, and to control and monitor the project at various scales, conveying forms and images, functions and performances in a new dimension of ‘bit’ sharing.
The essays, research and projects published in AGATHÓN on Links | Physical, Virtual and Digital in the different disciplines of the project, highlight how the nature of things and their connection is one of the great issues that we are currently facing. They also introduce innovative approaches and actions to solve both ‘historical’ and new problems (anticipating systems, possible futures, etc.) and new inconveniences (exclusion, digital divide, etc.), arrogating the ‘vitalism’ claimed by the current cultural, social and economic challenges that influence the contents of Agenda 2030 and the principles of sustainability, innovation and social justice issues that underlie them. In fact, we are shifting from a reality made of things to a reality made of relations – connections – within a daily life made of ‘immateriality’. The papers, although not exhaustive of the fields of investigation, show a picture aiming to fuel an open cross-disciplinary and ascalar confrontation, to simultaneously and synergically deal with the subjects characterized by a hybridization and contamination process of the areas of connection that today are prefigurable and possible – between people, between people and things/places and between things/places – inside of an ‘ecosystem’ that is increasingly a synthesis of these three interaction modes.