PANDA, an exhibition by OMA & Bengler, opens today at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale – After Belonging.
From the architect. PANDA investigates the accelerating influence of digital sharing platforms, their social and political implications, and pervasive impact on the built environment. In the early 2000s, the democratic spaces of the web were greeted as an alternative to centralized commercial and social structure; in 2007, after the financial landslide, the sharing gospel gave hope to those struggling to make a living.
The boom of “sharing platforms” provided the private sphere with powerful market mechanics, enabling the fluid commodification of life. Flexible, web-scale human resourcing drew “app freelancers” into the gig economy — an unprecedented economic reactivation of latent human assets. A new labor force emerged, one obliged to hire itself out for ever-smaller jobs with no safety net, as companies profited handsomely.
While sharing platforms employ organizational tools of savage power, masses are atomized — strong-armed into unorganized negotiation.
Crowds attack taxis and block streets as services are banned in countries around the world. Unrest is staged against app-based, short-term accommodation platforms and the conversion of entire buildings into de facto hotels.
PANDA is a counter-organizational platform, providing a tactical disruption-as-a-service toolkit, empowering app workers with the means to mediate terms with the platforms and their algocrat masters.
That the service materialized out of Kinshasa is probably a fabrication. Skirting traditional venture capital cycles,
it nevertheless emerged as a distributed, open source network of for-profit tactical nodes. Untraceable and decentralized, a system of vast data and self-regulating algorithmic control.
PANDA is at once an act of resistance and a business opportunity, conceived within the cultural framework and space of new digital economic realms. It is the antibody of metastasizing platform capitalism.
Within mere months, PANDA experienced dramatic expansion, crystallizing the masses in tactical just-in-time action groups: from intangible interventions to exaggerated physical transformations.
As software eats the world, as everything solid melts into air, PANDA recasts technologies of oppression into a machinery of individual empowerment. By providing tools to actively navigate the turmoils of new digital regimes, PANDA fosters a new sense of belonging and purpose.
PANDA has been led by OMA’s Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Bengler’s Even Westwang and Simen Svale Skogsrud. It is part of the On Residence exhibition, on display at the National Museum of Architecture.
OMA Team: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Paul Cournet, Giacomo Ardesio, Giulio Margheri, Laurence Bolhaar Bengler Team: Simen Svale Skogsrud, Even Eidsten Westvang, Øyvind Rostad, Kristoffer Sivertsen
Press Release via OMA.
Title
OMA & Bengler Present PANDA, An Investigation of the Share Economy at the 2016 Oslo Architecture TriennaleType
ExhibitionWebsite
Organizers
From
September 08, 2016 12:00 AMUntil
November 27, 2016 11:59 PMVenue
On Residence Exhibition, National Museum of ArchitectureAddress
