To display is to unfold, to reveal, to spread out. Every display holds an action, an intention and a story within it. Through its material gesture, it occupies and creates space, situating and guiding the viewer within a framework, within a context, within a narrative. In this respect, systems of display can be seen as carriers. Active, present or silent- they expose various potentialities of focus and reflect a system of thinking and likewise projecting.

During a 3 month period, the design studio fanfare invited the reflective architecture studio, Fabulous Future,to investigate the display system – both as a playful friend for interaction, a guiding instrument for narration, and a manipulative tool for navigation. As such, the display was likewise considered a representative of platforms. Included in this focus was an urgency for transparent structures, process of production, conditions of learning, and silenced infrastructures, but also; ways of collaborating, building connections, distributing knowledge, being inclusive, and sharing findings. This leads to a guiding research question: How are platforms imagined through digital, spatial, and visual practice, and how may hybrid and artistic methods support our understanding of the platform?
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Digital platforms are everywhere, an everyware. We live within them. How do you imagine their architecture? How are digital platforms extended, translated, interpreted, staged? How can a creative interdisciplinary approach contribute to the understanding of platforms? How can concerned publics be included?

Digital platforms are often marketed as ‘places’ for intimate communication, for sharing opinions; platforms enable fast-track shopping and ways to make a livelihood; platforms present us - a radically uneven worldwide audience of participants - with the possibility to produce, sort and archive information, while more data is extracted, mobilised or concealed. As old platforms peak and new platforms arise, what defines a digital platform remains abstract and difficult to confine. Relatedly, a tendency emerges across the creative field to spatialise platforms, embody them or put them on display.

Imagining platforms compiles a growing list of references to design and artistic initiatives as the sites from which critical awareness and speculative imagination about our technological present can emerge, be trained, rehearsed, performed. The references are collected through curated as well as occasional unpredicted conversational moments.