La realidad de la ciudad virtual

acerca de la transmisión de mensajes

Abstract

he current preeminence of the virtual, as a result of COVID-19 confinement, has exacerbated an already latent condition in architecture. The architectural discipline has depended for decades on virtual media for educational and professional purposes; nonetheless, the current dependence on the virtual evidences shows how the inequality on infrastructural distribution causes uneven access to virtual media. The essay questions this accessibility, through the notion of infrastructures as political mediators as defined by North American architectural theorist Reinhold Martin. This notion of infrastructures as mediators considers them to be capable of enabling or impeding access, for example, to knowledge. Finally, the virtual is also understood as a form of abstraction of reality, as a layer that mediates our experience with reality and allows an alternative reading of the city’s infrastructures as the locus of utopia, implying the possibility of a critical mediation with reality.