Editorial | The construction of information
Abstract
In its nineteenth issue, the V!RUS journal is pleased to present a broad reflection on the construction of information today. Researchers from various areas responded to our invitation to dialogue, by sharing their research and experiences from a variety of points of view, greatly enriching the debate. The common denominator of their work is the city as a locus of intersection of all the great informational flows which bias urban life and society. We believe that going over the processes and strategies by which information is produced today is essential to understand the social role of academia in the larger effort of knowledge production.
We, therefore, gladly welcome the forty-seven authors –selected in intense joint work with dedicated and generous external reviewers– who contribute, with their articles, to make the topic more complex. Such diversity is best perceived by noting how varied their areas of education and practice are: Architecture and Urbanism, Visual Arts, Library Science, Information Science, Social Sciences, Communication and Contemporary Culture, Communication and Semiotics, Social Communication, Industrial Design, Interaction Design, Civil Engineering, Water Resources Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Physics, History, Journalism, Letters, Complex Systems Modelling, Urban Planning, Advertising and Marketing, Psychology, and Sociology.
The interview “To dispute the meaning of the world” with the Social Scientist and Full Professor at our Institute of Architecture and Urbanism Cibele Rizek offers a broad view of the issue’s theme from an academic prospect. Comprehensions on the University as a locus of knowledge production are the focused on “Towards abstraction: reflections on the university crisis”, by Stella Cândido.
The city and its inhabitants are are understood as information production agents in the articles Cities as information, by Vinicius de Moraes Netto, Edgardo Brigatti, João Meirelles, Fabiano Ribeiro and Caio Cacholas, Machine Learning for the accessibility to urban scale analysis, by José Aderson Passos Filho and Daniel Cardoso, Technical advisory and spatial imaginaries of socio-spatial groups, by Alexandre Bomfim.
The construction of information grounded on expanded notions of cartography is approached in articles such as Indisciplinar Cartographic Method: from rhizome’s topology to topography, by Marcela Lopes, Natacha Rena and Ana Isabel de Sá,Walking and cartographing on the Chuí-Chuy border, by Eduardo Rocha, Lorena Resende, Luana Detoni, Taís dos Santos and Vanessa Forneck, and Atlas, a bet and the atlas-device, by Ricardo Trevisan.
The issue on control and the use of personal data in publicly accessible digital platforms is addressed in the works Malicious Interfaces: strategies for personal data collection in apps, by André Lemos e Daniel Marques, and Ethical implications of the Chinese Social Credit System on cities’ daily life, by Renê Arruda and Thiago Silva. The article Caronaê: ridesharing at the UFRJ campus, by Luisa Teixeira e Rodrigo Paraizo, discusses the creation and operation of a specific digital platform.
Two works bring together artistic expressions in exhibition spaces and interaction possibilities as ways of constructing information: Transhabitat: generative images of an atopic habitation, by Matheus Camargo, Information diffusion in museums: digital technology, interaction and dialogue, by Diego Ricca e Clice Mazzilli. Moreover, the process of audiovisual creation in documentary films is read through the lens of cybernetics in Cinema, cybernetics and a new observational relationship, by Pedro Teixeira and Marcelo Tramontano.
Usually gathering articles under a common sub-theme, the Carpet section presents five works that discuss the image as a central element in information construction processes: The € Monument and the Capitalocentrism, by Victor Sardenberg and Beatriz Chnaiderman, Landscapes of skin and pixels: urban history, perception, and images, by Maria Angélica da Silva, Fabio Nogueira, Roseline Oliveira and Jaianny Duarte, Paradoxes of photorealistic images and architectural representation, by Mariana Zancaneli, Frederico Braida and Isabela Ferreira, Cartoon and society, by Felipe Martins, and Tattoo: an art form of connected information, by Patrícia Sales e Zeny Duarte.
In the Project section, a design process aided by generative and performative algorithms is the object of study of the article Performative design essay for a pavilion, by Cynthia Marconsini e Leandro Conradt. Finally, the article Baugruppen: the German model of cohousing and its constitutive variables, by Anie Figueira e Ricardo Trevisan, discusses the use of Internet in the organization of cohousing.
We also thank all the ad hoc reviewers who have kindly collaborated with us on the difficult task of selecting papers for publication over the thirteen years of the journal's existence. Their contribution is key to the double-blind peer review process, to strengthen the space of dialogue proposed by the journal and ensure its quality. The names and institutions of those who collaborated with us in the last six editions of V!RUS, between 2017 and 2019, can be found here.
May this body of works inspire reflections and actions of our readers.
