Randi Heinrichs
Armin Beverungen
We want to explore how digital twins are entangled with ruins: how they produce specific perspectives on the future, relate to decay and ruination in the present, and seem to circumvent the past. Digital twins are usually defined as virtual representations of physical objects or processes, with a data connection between them offering real-time feedback and control. They are widely marketed as catalysts of the future, promising sustainability, resilience, and efficiency through holistic systems, real-time synchronization, and predictive capabilities. Yet these narratives obscure how digital twins are embedded in historical and material conditions – conditions that cannot be preserved or rescued through technical fixes and may not even be intended to endure. This becomes visible when digital twins do not act in service of a long-term future, but instead confront ruins – whether of the past, such as aging infrastructure, or of the future, such as sinking islands. In our research, we have come across several digital twins that engage with ruins in different ways. These include: the digital twin of the Köhlbrand Bridge in the Port of Hamburg, which seeks to optimize the just-in-time decay of a to-be-demolished structure through predictive maintenance; the control room at Pluto in Herne, which manages pit water in the ruinous, post-coal landscapes of the Ruhr; the yet-to-be-built digital twin of Tuvalu, a Pacific island condemned to under-water ruin through the climate crisis; and the Rescue-Mate digital twin in Hamburg, a crisis management tool designed to mitigate the ruinous effects of high floods and other disasters.
The question we want to explore is how digital twins produce a particular temporal relation, to ruinous past or futures, and act to avoid, manage, mitigate or circumvent ruins. We have selected the case of the control room at Pluto to include a local example, and the overall selection of cases is meant to allow us to explore how digital twins’ relations to ruinous pasts and futures are conditioned both by their abstract, general logics and dynamics and the local contexts and ruinous states in which they are set up. As a result, the case group aims to map how digital twins relate to ruins — conceptually, temporally, and materially — and to explore what it means to think with and maybe rethink digital twins before ruins. This may result in a joint publication, potentially the establishment of a working group around digital twins and ruination, or simply in individuals taking these reflections forward in their respective research.
We welcome participants who bring additional examples of digital twins that engage with ruination — whether in anticipation, response, or negotiation. Participants could either bring their own case material to be presented and discussed or simply participate in the analysis and exploration of the cases we and others bring along. We expect that we will collect case material and distribute this among the group for preparation prior to the conference sessions. We expect the day to commence with a tour of the control room at Pluto in Herne, traveling back to RUB for lunch, followed by two sessions in which we first collective explore select cases (3-5, decided upon by the group) in terms of their relation to ruins, before mapping and condensing reflections and findings and considering next steps for potential future collaboration (writing, network).