‘digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future’ engages with digital property and data infrastructures, and explores new modes and impacts of data collection affecting architecture, urban infrastructure, and supply chains.

Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these “supplies”. There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these various kinds of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources.

This exhibition will be the debut exhibition in Canada for the premise of the book ‘digitalSTRUCTURES’. Using a mixed-media approach, this exhibition couples a novel exploration of XR (mixed-reality) and AR (augmented reality) into several parts of the book.

To advance the dialogue of book design and production, the ambition of ‘digitalSTRUCTURES’ is to prolong the shelf-life of emergent data and case-studies on the topic. The author’s talk will discuss how the book is complemented with an open-access digital platform for readers to access video interviews with the industry experts, diagrammatic mapping and graphical cartography, and 3D artifacts that shows how data interacts with phygital properties.

Authored by Wendy W Fok, who has been researching and writing on the topic for over a decade. ‘digitalSTRUCTURES’ includes a foreword by Jesse Reiser and Julian Harake; interviews with and contributions by Greg Lynn, Saskia Sassen, Minerva Tantoco, Lydia Kallipoliti, Michael Young and Kutan Ayata, Andrew Witt, Amber Bartosh, Mik Nayeem, with an ongoing list of interactive interviews.

DesignTO x KEDD

‘digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future’ is one of 10 projects in the King East Design District (located in Old Town Toronto), a neighbourhood running along King Street East, from Church Street to Parliament Street. During the DesignTO Festival, you are invited to visit exhibitions, workshops and talks hosted in the showrooms of select local businesses.

• External Influences by Charlotte Blake at Daltile | Mohawk Group (160 King Street East)
• Tête-à-Tête: A Portrait Exhibition at Beauchamp Art Gallery (167 King Street East)
• MINDFULLY MADE at EQ3 (222 King Street East)
• Democracy in Motion by by ARCTRN Group at Aquavato’s future showroom (158 Front Street East; west side of Sherbourne Street, north of Front Street)
• bulthaup X Carl Hansen & Søn: ‘The Sound of Design’ at bulthaup Toronto (280 King Street East)
• Octet Truss w/ Snake by Jamie Wolfond Studio at bulthaup Toronto (280 King Street East)
• digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future by Wendy W. Fok at Relative Space (330 King Street East)
• United by Design, Detroit x Toronto: A tale of two design cities by Design Core Detroit and Cambria at Cambria Gallery (91 Parliament Street)
• Toller Cranston – The Painter: An Exhibition of Original Works at Cambria Gallery (91 Parliament Street)
• Make the Invisible Visible: A BMD Data Visualization Hackathon at Bruce Mau Design Studio (340 King Street East, Suite 500)

On Friday, January 27, join us for King East Design District Party presented by DesignTO, a roaming neighbourhood party anchored by five Party Hubs. The KEDD Party is a must-attend bash, bringing together hundreds of designers and design-lovers.