“Performing an Urban Digital Twin: Diffracting the City Imaginary” presented by Unknown presenters

Urban digital twins are described as virtual replicas or representations of physical space. Through an autoethnographic encounter with Digital Twin Victoria alongside visual demonstrations by and interviews with spatial industry professionals, this paper analyses two performances of the digital twin to diffract the city imaginary it presents. By visualising the city within the computational standards and selective layering of geolocated datasets, the digital twin produces a singular vision of a perpetual present. When navigated with digital skill and aligned through a ‘comforting’ aerial view, the digital twin performs an expected, beautiful city. Yet as I, lacking such skill, clumsily descend to street level, it performs an increasingly monstrous city. With reference to Australian artist Stelarc’s Exoskeleton and French artist ORLAN’s surgical performances, I analyse my failure to perform the coherent city to demonstrate how such performances reveal the politics of failure and challenge normalised expectations of what it is to be human, to be beautiful or to be a city. I argue that paying attention to the visions revealed within moments of failure, or gaps within the standards, contributes to reframing such moments as openings to alternative city imaginaries.