Bright Cityscapes is a station, part of the Timișoara 2023 European Capital of Culture Program.This project aims to observe, respond to, and act on contemporary emergencies through design, architecture, and digital culture. With the overall mission of understanding digital transformation in Eastern Europe, the program starts with research in the Timișoara industrial (productive) and academic ecosystem. It connects international professionals, designers, sociologists, creative networks, schools, and companies to develop and document research-based practices in the visibility of context-anchored perspectives on digital transformation as a global phenomenon and its implications on specific physical ecosystems.
Interested in placing Timișoara, Romania, and its creative industry in a common international discourse on digital transformation and in developing a more personalised, grounded, and qualitative narrative alongside the quantitative one of the economic sector, Bright Cityscapes is a multidisciplinary program aimed at creating bridges of collaboration, facilitating experimental initiatives, and connecting what is happening in contemporary design with what is not yet happening in Timișoara. In this vision, the program connects places and practitioners. It uses formats such as exhibitions, conferences, workshops, and an academic training program to experiment with creating emphatic, surprising, critical, and non-linear discourses. Observing through different lenses the performances and contradictions of digitization in specific places is fundamental. At the same time, alternative narratives to the capitalist, technocrat, and un-situated discourse are necessary.
In response to the urgency of exploring digital transformations in Romania, the proposal considers the numerous different forms - media, performances, platforms, jobs, tools, and possibilities - both digital and physical. Moreover, it focuses on applying and experimenting with cultural production, presentation, and conversation formats that can combine the two realms into a solid program. The program is based not only on principles and needs dear to the local and communities of practitioners in Timișoara but also on those connected to it - making it a solid starting point for exploring digital transformation in Eastern Europe.
Bright Cityscapes aims to reach approximately 20,000 people through its program - the general public, students, designers, researchers, and teaching staff in Timișoara, the country, the region, and Europe. The program is embodied through anchoring dialogues, multidisciplinary work projects, an academic exchange, 3 exhibitions, 2 conferences, 1 publication, and 1 podcast.
Through critical and constructive dialogue, the program aims to produce a locally grounded and internationally relevant discourse on digital transformation.