Futile Datascapes
Federico Godino
Federico Godino is an architect living and working in Milan. He graduated in Politecnico di Milano with a thesis on platform economies in the city of Sao Paulo. Since then his research interest has been focused in describing immaterial phenomena and their impact on reality. He published for many journals, magazines and conferences and he’s the organizer of Zones’s Portuaires festival architecture and urbanism public program, he currently works for Stefano Boeri Architetti
This research wants to investigate the internet infrastructure connecting Italy’s internal areas. This crucial topic last year brought to a controversial political debate on the commission of a unique network as a solution to the IT isolation of small countryside settlements in Italy. The paradox that many of these territories live is that they are hotspots of data production linked to tourism but they lack the necessary internet infrastructure to allow local economic activities to grow and remote workers to settle there permanently. The aim of this research is to map the existing infrastructure and compare it to the production of georeferenced Instagram posts in a sample summer period. In this way it will be possible to create a mapping visualizing the divide between the need of a permanent internet infrastructure and the largely futile use of the existing one to share images on social media. This comparison is meant to finally show a self-representation gap that is slowly been filled between internal areas and the rest of Italy. This unprecedented number of images from these relatively isolated territories is now creating a narration and an aesthetic that was impossible before the rise of social networks.
