Debut exhibition in Canada for the premise of the book ‘digitalSTRUCTURES’. Using a mixed-media approach, this exhibition couples a novel exploration of XR (mixed-reality) and AR (augmented reality) into several parts of the book. To advance the dialogue of book design and production, the ambition of ‘digitalSTRUCTURES’ is to prolong the shelf-life of emergent data and case-studies on the topic. The author’s talk will discuss how the book is complemented with an open-access digital platform for readers to access video interviews with the industry experts, diagrammatic mapping and graphical cartography, and 3D artifacts that shows how data interacts with phygital properties. As architects, we build a large portion of the physical spaces and megastructures that host digital infrastructure.

For some Americans, there is a certain comfort in knowing where your data and information is — physically and digitally. According to the Pew and Cisco Cybersecurity Privacy Surveys over 84% of the American population under 45 years old care where their data is, but found it difficult to find where it is. How comfortable are you in letting private corporations and public nation-states operate with and peer into your deepest desires through the lens of scattered facts that you provide online, through social media searches, and physical daily-lives? Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these “supplies.” There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these painful (uncomfortable) truths of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources. Over the past decade, my research engages with of digital property and data infrastructures and explores new modes and impacts of data collection affecting architecture, supply chains, and urban infrastructure. Part of that research is to investigate the uncomfortable realities of the ‘hidden infrastructures’ that probe our daily lives, that is sometimes hidden in plain-sight, or channeled through the submarine and subterranean worlds of our cities, suburban roads, and rural post-pastoral farmlands.