As we live our lives increasingly mediated through digital interfaces, compression has become an ubiquitous part of our technology saturated environments. Compression is defined in data science as the reduction of file size or bandwidth needed to store or transfer information. Rather than reducing the amount of information we consume, compression allows for the densification of data, images, video, social media updates, 24 h news alerts... Compression can be understood as densification of information within the digital, but also as information spilling from the mediated spaces of digital technology into lived spaces, rewiring the territories we inhabit. As technology becomes embedded within our societies, through sensing, mapping and tracking technologies, the digital is informed by the material world. Compression operates on the interface, the intersection, or the blurring between the mediated and lived spaces. Digital technologies are not neutral, access to data and computational power depends on economic and political power in addition to technological infrastructure. Tech companies and digital platforms are emergent economic and political powers approaching or even surpassing the wealth and power of sovereign nation states. As such, compression can be broader understood as having societal, political, economic, experiential, aesthetic and spatial dimensions. Vertically compression is interconnecting or delaminating different layers of the stacks that make up the Technosphere, horizontally compression is ubiquitous but unevenly distributed, resulting in hotspots, contested territories, in-between zones and shifting borders.
With technological innovation pushing for an ever increasing bandwidth, resolution and framerate, current temporal and partial manifestations of compression might be short-lived moments on path to a seamless integration of the digital and the material. We approach compression as a means of grasping the contemporary moment, explore what these dimensions mean for design disciplines engaging the complexities of contemporary surroundings.

The topic of compression is framed within a larger interest in current media ecologies, more specifically how digital media and communication technologies affect environments. The term Media Ecology was originally devised by Marshal Mc Luhan in the 1960, leading to the emergence of media studies as field of research. He understood media as extensions of human capacities and argued that media, more than their content, impact how societies and cultures develop. The notion of media ecology was further developed by Neil Postman & Walter Ong, who stated that instead of studying media objects themselves, media ecology emphasises the relationships between media objects and how they constitute environments.
Sixty years and several digital revolutions later, the understanding of media as environments gained even more relevance since the emergence of networked distributed digital technologies, where there is no longer a vertical hierarchy between receiver and sender. Digital media constitute environments we increasingly spend our lives in: from inboxes, conference calls, professional

Contemporary media ecologies enabled through digital technologies, rely on extensive computational power and processing and storage of vast amounts of data. There is nothing inherently visual about computation, although data is rendered visual through screens for our comprehension. Visualising data plays an important role in diverse activities such as science, commerce, governance, logistics, warfare... While these activities rely on extensive computational power to crunch large sets of data, it is in particular cultural production that relies on visual data and is computationally expensive. Through sensing technologies and digital cameras, vision has increasingly become algorithmic: computational visual technologies are not just capturing images of the world, but are putting them through computational processes of filtering, segmentation, classification, adding metadata and tags. Instead of singular static objects, they become part of a dynamic ecology of images.
Most digital imagery is subject to some form of compression, which attempt to reduce file size and bandwidth without distorting the readability of the image. Compression attempts to be invisible, revealing itself in conditions where bandwidth is scarce. Only through errors and glitches, digital images reveal their algorithmic qualities, giving a glimpse into the discrete resolution of digital files, revealing the mediality, or the materiality of the digital medium. Since digital technologies are deeply affecting our environments, and understanding their impact is indispensable for urban design and architecture, we can learn from practices such as media arts and glitch art, that exploit their algorithmic nature. Within fieldstation studio we have been developing a research trajectory ‘new eyes / algorithmic vision’, which explores how architecture and urban design, disciplines relying heavily on the visual senses, respond to novel ways of seeing, mapping and visualising our world. The media ecologies and visual cultures these technologies give rise to, are not merely representing but actually shaping the environments in which we operate. Our world is increasingly experienced and produced through digital media. The research develops strategies for architectural and urban design practices to actively engage the complexities of our current surroundings through narrative, time-based and computational media.