Activities

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.