Real Time symposium presented by Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning

Real Time,” the semester’s second Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium, will take place on April 13 in Cornell AAP’s Milstein Auditorium, and will bring together artists, designers, and scholars to investigate the spatial politics of realtime—a term that is regaining relevance with new applications such as realtime gaming engine visualizations, realtime digital twinning, realtime metaverse interactions, realtime military strikes, and realtime urban sensing. The conference looks at how computational technocracy is being translated into infrastructures, data-collection methods, modeling paradigms, and information visualizations that connect war games, video games, and urban games. “Real Time” examines the history of realtime control and capitalization through applications in the military, entertainment, and urban spheres, with a special emphasis on underprivileged communities and migrant people that are frequently the targets of realtime surveillance and containment. Importantly, the symposium expands real-time media production approaches that provide more just spatial and temporal arrangements.

The program is divided into three panels, each followed by a keynote address: Liveness investigates the value and creative possibilities of instantaneity in an era of on-demand media entertainment, digital asset libraries, and persistent virtual worlds; Fidelity investigates the role of temporal and spatial resolution in the production of informational authority; and Transmissions investigates the histories, present, and future imaginaries that regimes of record collecting allow and forbid. Finally, the symposium asks whether it is possible to disassemble realtime architectures and reassemble more ethical and equitable computational concepts of space, time, and being—to imagine the movement of packets, pixels, and neurons beyond the purview of military, security, and financial interests.