Performative Environments: Architecture Acting with Flows

The paper explores how performative architecture can act as a collective environment localizing urban flows and establishing public domains through the integration of pervasive computing and animation techniques. The NoRA project introduces the concept of ‘performative environments,' focusing on the means by which architecture can enact places through socio-technical relationships. The architecture stands out as dynamic and open and carries emergent affects that facilitate interaction in a new configuration between objects and subjects. By crossing social and technological networks between flows of local interactions and network behaviour, building becomes social infrastructure and prompts an understanding of architectural structures as quasiobjects, which can retain both variation and recognisability in changing social constellations.