Ninth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The new public space of the Brazilian megacities and Barcelona, Spain, now politicized and aesthetized, is the result of the accelerated growth of communication technologies and of the media culture responsible for the transnationalization of cultures, displacements, contradictions, and mobile urban designs of a pluritemporal and spatial heterogeneity starting from of the mid-1990s. Since June 29, 2013, collective forces published by social networks have emerged indicating that, as Lévy (1996) has suggested, online space is a real space. The fundamental question of research can be summarized as follows: How can online networks create a real digital world and produce a new political and aesthetic image of urban and contemporary Brazil and Spain? The self-reflexive aesthetics that structure this hyperindividualist consumption encouraged by the digital universe symbolizes a relevant vector for the identity affirmation of individuals, leading them, in real time, to political participation of spectacular character, reified by the mass media. Such a densification of theatrical dimensions of politics in the digital universe stems from the transesthetic era of hyper-modern aesthetization of consumer markets that extrapolates production spheres, reaching lifestyles, relationships with the body, the taste for fashion, shows, music, tourism, cultural heritage, and the decoration of the house at all levels of society. The hyperindividualist regime of consumption disseminated by digital media is hedonistic and emotional, or aesthetic, leading to the pleasure of discovery, evasion, and non-compliance with conventional codes of social representation.