EXHIBITION: CITYVERSE – A speculative utopia under dataveillance

The Department of Visual Culture is pleased to present the outcomes of the Artistic Project Visual Culture 2025 in a public exhibition at Improper Walls gallery, Vienna.

„every click, every move has the potential to count for something, for someone somewhere somehow.” (Gitelman 2013) We’re currently experiencing a „Data Renaissance,“ where data is seen as a „gold mine“ and referred to as „the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world,“ fueling our latest speculative bubble. (Gitelman 2013). Presenting the illusion of individualism, our urban spaces and daily lives are being shaped by highly standardized transactions and multiplied solutions. Google Maps navigates us through the complexity of geolocations, providing information on traffic congestion in return. Lime e-scooters accelerate our walking tempo, collecting private movement patterns in exchange, while vacuum cleaning robots perfect our living spaces for the cost of a floor plan. Mass-scale data exchange profoundly influences city planning, with companies like Google and Meta emerging as major players in a capitalist-driven urbanization. Yet, this influence operates on their terms and conditions. Do you consciously choose to live in a Truman Show or BarbieLand?

In CITYVERSE – A SPECULATIVE UTOPIA UNDER DATAVEILLANCE, the students critically engaged with the new realities of platform urbanism, reflecting on how data technologies reshape urban life and influence the design of urban spaces. The resulting virtual prototypes and environments will be presented in a collective exhibition and discussion held on Thursday, 26 June 2025, from 14:00 to 19:00, at Improper Walls.

With contributions by

GÖZDE ARSLANCAN, IVANA MARKOVA, ESRA ALTAS, ALFREDO SILLES, KONSTANTINOS GIANNOPULOS, MARIEKE RIBKA, MARÍA ROSALES, FRAYM HANNA, ANNA LAMBERG, CARMEN IOANA RADOI, MARIIA MOLODCHA, LUIS ANDRÉ HENZLER CARRASCAL, TOBIAS SAM | MAŁGORZATA TRYBUŁA, RUINING TONG, NICOLE STECHER, HELEN WROBEL, XINXIN QIU | STEFANIA-IOANA MELEAN

Improper Walls
Reindorfgasse 42,
1150 Wien