Mimicry of spatial forms of a modern city

Nadezh­da D. Astasho­va
Lobachevsky State Uni­ver­si­ty of Nizh­ni Nov­gorod

Anna L. Kodan­i­na
Lobachevsky State Uni­ver­si­ty of Nizh­ni Nov­gorod

Mim­ic­ry of spa­tial forms of a mod­ern city

Abstract. The arti­cle focus­es on the analy­sis of a new type of urban space. The rea­son­ing pro­ceeds through con­sid­er­a­tion of var­i­ous aspects of the socio-spa­tial orga­ni­za­tion of a mod­ern city. The aim is to iden­ti­fy the spe­cif­ic fea­tures of urban space in the era of dig­i­tal and infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies, which will allow to for­mu­late a new atti­tude to the con­struc­tion of the human life world in a techno­genic soci­ety. The author con­cludes that the today’s for­ma­tion of cul­tur­al forms is direct­ly relat­ed to the influx of new infor­ma­tion, so the mon­u­men­tal sta­t­ic image of the city of past eras is becom­ing exhaust­ed. The mod­ern cul­ture of the city is a con­tin­u­ous updat­ing and move­ment of infor­ma­tion, with archi­tec­tur­al forms express­ing this real­i­ty, being, in fact, a prod­uct of com­plex engi­neer­ing: peo­ple live in an envi­ron­ment of tech­no­log­i­cal arti­facts that form a dynam­ic set of “net­works”. With­in the accel­er­at­ing urban life, the ambi­gu­i­ty and mobil­i­ty of socio-spa­tial forms lead to a reduc­tion in the per­cep­tion of the mean­ings of the urban envi­ron­ment where the orig­i­nal mean­ing is becom­ing lost in the “mosa­ic” of con­stant space trans­for­ma­tions. The focus is on the emo­tion­al and aes­thet­ic aspect of the per-cep­tion of space in which the form forms its own plans of real­i­ty, which, in our opin­ion, are most accu­rate­ly described through the bio­log­i­cal con­cept of “mim­ic­ry”. Mim­ic­ry becomes a kind of syn­thet­ic lan­guage with­in which human­i­ty is forced to “talk” to over­sat­u­rat­ed infor­ma­tion and extreme­ly com­pli­cat­ed volatile envi­ron­ment. Thus, the devel­op­ment of techno­genic civ­i­liza­tion has not only changed our way of life, the lan­guage of cul­ture and our think­ing. The prin­ci­ples of human inter­ac­tion with the envi­ron­ment have moved to a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent lev­el: the forms of the mod­ern city are now designed to reflect the chang­ing state of human con­scious­ness rather than express their own mean­ings. The mim­ic­ry of form has become an expres­sion of trans­paren­cy and vir­tu­al­i­ty of our con­tem­po­rary being.

Key­words: city, spaсе form, techno­genic civ­i­liza­tion, vir­tu­al­i­ty, dig­i­tal soci­ety, change­able real­i­ty.

DOI10.5840/dspl20181454

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