{"title":"From Models to Mirror Worlds","authors":"Amelyn Ng","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9964773","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay contemplates the media histories and politics of the digital twin: an accurate three-dimensional model designed to offer data-based simulation, predictive capability, and remote control over a material entity. Currently being developed across the spheres of industry, design, and “smart city” governance, digital twins are “digital-physical” databases purporting not only to represent the appearance of an object but also to capture or simulate all changes to its physical and informatic state, down to the bolt or data point. What are the media histories and stakes of a real-time digital simulation of the world? What of the desire to imitate the physical world in fully machine-readable form? Through three episodes that contribute to the technological imaginary of the twin—the digital factory, the “smart” building model, and the 3D “dashboard” city—it shows how contemporary simulations do not simply reflect reality or create fictional ones but are committed to remaking reality over and over again—each time with greater efficiency, oversight, and predictability.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Cultural Politics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9964773","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:This essay contemplates the media histories and politics of the digital twin: an accurate three-dimensional model designed to offer data-based simulation, predictive capability, and remote control over a material entity. Currently being developed across the spheres of industry, design, and “smart city” governance, digital twins are “digital-physical” databases purporting not only to represent the appearance of an object but also to capture or simulate all changes to its physical and informatic state, down to the bolt or data point. What are the media histories and stakes of a real-time digital simulation of the world? What of the desire to imitate the physical world in fully machine-readable form? Through three episodes that contribute to the technological imaginary of the twin—the digital factory, the “smart” building model, and the 3D “dashboard” city—it shows how contemporary simulations do not simply reflect reality or create fictional ones but are committed to remaking reality over and over again—each time with greater efficiency, oversight, and predictability.
期刊介绍:
Cultural Politics is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. Cultural Politics explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. Publishing across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, the journal welcomes articles from different political positions, cultural approaches, and geographical locations. Cultural Politics publishes work that analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined, and resolved. In so doing, the journal supports the innovative study of established, embryonic, marginalized, or unexplored regions of cultural politics. Cultural Politics, while embodying the interdisciplinary coverage and discursive critical spirit of contemporary cultural studies, emphasizes how cultural theories and practices intersect with and elucidate analyses of political power. The journal invites articles on representation and visual culture; modernism and postmodernism; media, film, and communications; popular and elite art forms; the politics of production and consumption; language; ethics and religion; desire and psychoanalysis; art and aesthetics; the culture industry; technologies; academics and the academy; cities, architecture, and the spatial; global capitalism; Marxism; value and ideology; the military, weaponry, and war; power, authority, and institutions; global governance and democracy; political parties and social movements; human rights; community and cosmopolitanism; transnational activism and change; the global public sphere; the body; identity and performance; heterosexual, transsexual, lesbian, and gay sexualities; race, blackness, whiteness, and ethnicity; the social inequalities of the global and the local; patriarchy, feminism, and gender studies; postcolonialism; and political activism.