CONTROL SYNTAX RIO

Control Syntax Rio shows the city of Rio de Janeiro structured through the control syntax and smart city command processes. This syntax is assembled from seemingly banal if-then statements that become surprisingly charged by their encounters with the political and circulatory life of the city. Through COR (Rio’s command and control hub), the exhibition sees traffic engineering as urban politics and as haunted by potential catastrophe. In the exhibition, a street route through the city doubles as a COR decision path in which every incident is assessed to learn if it will escalate to an event, an emergency, or a crisis. Through this code, we are able to perceive glimpses of the current image of urban computational governmentality, not only blithely directed toward engineered efficiency but also saturated with a thousand narratives of possible threat, risk, disruption, and instability.