A presentation about a world that is increasingly mediated by screens and digital conceptualizations of space on three screens with digital conceptualizations of space is not just meta: it was the engaging and immersive format of Liam Young's lecture/performance Wednesday night at SCI-Arc, "City Everywhere: Kim Kardashian and the Dark Side of the Screen." Young's fair warning to the packed lecture hall that the live sound mixing of his narration and syncing of three separate video feeds might go awry turned out to be unnecessary; the presentation was flawless while simultaneously visceral, a kind of Purple Rose of Cairo experience for architectural discourse. The pervasive reach of the internet makes us all actors in this particular film. 

Young's presentation was a quasi-fictional tour of "a city that is hiding in plain sight," which is to say the current urban and mental space(s) that we inhabit thanks to the reality of digital mediation. The most shocking and resonant example of this space was a real news item about a man who drove his car off a bridge and killed his passenger because he trusted his GPS navigation system over the boring analog reality of the bridge being closed for repairs. While it's tempting to file that incident under the Darwin Awards, Young layered in a disturbing series of examples of how the digital has gradually come to redefine the physical, even for those who can read a road sign. He showed footage of a student project of the making of an entirely fake island: fake geo-mapping with photos and reviews, fake Wikipedia entry, even a faked scale model of a favela-like hillside community that could be filmed against a green screen and then broadcast on the internet, live, to allow people to check up on it in so-called real-time. The innocuous nature of this fakery, this trust we inadvertently give to our search engines and bookmarks and algorithms, was echoed on two of the screens with a roving satellite map search that highlighted various "landmarks" on the earth's surface, including a giant face in a mountain ridge in Canada and what appeared to be a Firefox logo in some agricultural fields. The images were real and not real; they were, or rather are, captures from the boundary of the unfurling digital present, a place that increasingly governs our physical reality, our economy, and our understanding of our own desires.

Young displayed images of Facebook's central server warehouse for all of the site's photographs, which is located in a nondescript town in Oregon. Young noted that instead of a cathedral or a library housing humanity's treasured information, the architecture of the digital age is kept in a "tin shed." Indeed, Kim Kardashian, who Young invoked not even as a person exactly but rather as the most popular assemblage of personas in our digital age, was the ideal docent for this dehumanized territory, taking shopping trips for genetically altered goldfish and snapping selfies of underpaid iPhone assembly workers in China. She did break the internet, after all: it's fitting she would be the guide for the digital era's perpetual reassembly/reformation/transformation.

To close his presentation, Young visually surveyed the high amounts of toxic waste produced by laptops and smartphones and their corresponding effect on the physical environment before segueing into "Silent Spring," a performance piece wherein song birds were placed in a room with a carbon dioxide dispenser. More and more CO2 was released into the room to mimic the predicted levels in the earth's atmosphere through 2100. Eventually, as a grim caption broadcast the planet's likely overpopulation figures and the increasing invasive reach of technology, the song birds fell silent.