Transurban Love is a research-based installation showing the way daily urbanisms have been radically reshaped by new forms of love resulting from the development of digital interaction, massive data storage capacity, robotics, and locative media. Since 2008, love has been the ultimate geography of neoliberal ideology, technological consolidation, and real estate supremacy. In the post-2008 era, true love was replaced by verified lovability; matching was replaced by profiling; helicopter-view condominiums took over 1980s, 90s and 2000s-era love-finding disco venues; and sex was replaced by trophy kitchens. Through a number of in-loop episodes, the immersive multimedia installation confronts the audience with urbanisms that allow digital love to exist.

In the last decades, four simultaneous phenomena have revolutionized the way architecture participates in the making of LOVE: 1. The development of location-based dating media (such as Grindr); 2. Monopolized control on the distribution of adult films (MindGeek); 3. The financial crisis; and 4. The money-storing condominium towers with “helicopter views.” These four emerged in 2008 as a coordinated process that produced an unforeseen outcome: a shift from the desire for true love to the collective assessment of verified lovability. Post-2008, LOVE has progressively stopped being an interpersonal human transaction (in the US, interhuman intercourse has decreased at a consistent 5 percent rate per decade; in Japan, half of the adult population claimed not to have engaged in interhuman intercourse in the past month) and has instead become an architectural business. This started as a process of urban atomization. At the height of the HIV crisis, humans were distributed in bubbles of comfortable prophylactics, and risk was surrogated to pockets of recorded promiscuity. Thirty years later, this has resulted in a process in which romance has progressively been embodied in architectural devices that no longer provide accommodation for LOVE, but have become LOVE itself.

Exhibition:

Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017. Imminent Commons (September 1–November 5, 2017.