Cyborg Landscapes

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Cyborg Landscapes is concerned with how dynamic and less precisely defined physical territories behave in response to existing but invisible energy fields, manifested in weather patterns, toxic threat, new geography, and evolving political borders. These elusive territories have mobile and independent conditions, foreign to the urban system and mentally exterior in the physical interior of the conurbation. They operate outside of the formal infrastructure of the built environment, allowing new transient geographies to emerge that transcend environmental and political boundaries, and providing opportunity for architectural speculation.

The proposal is situated in the territory of the Danube Basin, a place of transition, right where the fluctuating and ephemeral nature of its substance, water, is manifested. The River Danube has been and still is an infrastructure that promises a space of possibility, of expectation. Instead of thinking of the River Danube as a depot of our superfluous energy, this proposal imagines a possible Cyborg Landscape, an organism that has restored meaning and enhanced abilities due to the integration of artificial components and technology that rely on feedback. A network of devices that are responsive, adaptable, scalable, non-linear, and multivalent will be integrated above/on/into the water, assimilated in a landscape pattern gradient constructed on symmetric probability distribution. The landscape is performance, a tactical archipelago of living mechanisms.

Divna Desnica
Divna Desnica is an architect and urban designer based in Vienna. She holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from Politecnico di Milano (2016). Desnica has worked for research, architecture, urbanism, and development firms in Miami, Milan, and Vienna.

Lazar Belic
Lazar Belic is an architect and urban designer based in Milan. He holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from Politecnico di Milano (2016) and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Belgrade (2014). Belic has worked for research, interior, architecture, and development firms in Belgrade and Milan.

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