Architecture faculty members McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo have been selected for a multiyear exhibition and publication project by the INCA Project for their Big Tech and Counter-Technologies initiative. To kick off the project, they are participating in a one-week research colloquium (October 14–19, 2024) in Bologna, Italy, in dialogue with the other selected artists and the curatorial team of Carmen Lael Hines and Into the Black Box.

Clutter and Peñarroyo of EXTENTS propose a media-archeological recovery of the early internet cafe. Engaging with the urban context of Bologna, it will become a space that insists on the materiality of the digital sphere, re-spatializing internet consumption in order to critique pathologically naturalized and desocialized digital habits. Celebrating connection — digital, social, and tectonic — the cafe would be assembled from a mélange of building component systems, hacked to playfully unite.

Four winning projects were selected. The final exhibition will focus closely on the materiality of techno-capitalism on micro, meso to macro scales. Questions of labor, logistics and spatiality thread each project together to pose the following question: what is the spatiality of the digital?

INCA, “Increase corporate political responsibility and accountability”, investigates the impact that digital platforms have on European democracies and institutions. For more information: https://inca-project.eu/