###### tags: `Courses/Conferences` # Sensing Like a (Multipli)City ## Research summary Decentralized technologies is a term used to describe digital and spatial technologies which challenge the traditional centralized server model of prevailing software-hardware infrastructures. Examples of this range from Blockchain, which has been implemented successfully as alternative economic models for the current global monetary exchange, community peer to peer WiFi networks for participatory urbanism and more recently websites that could be hosted by their creators and be forked by others seamlessly. Peer to Peer (P2P) is a process or dynamic that can be found in many communities and movements self-organizing around the co-creation of culture and knowledge. Examples of this are the free/open source software movements and the Open Design and Open Source Architecture movement. The history of informatics has been shaped by a constant flux between decentralized phases and centralizing phases such as the one experienced today with GAFAM and BATX, accumulating value over the exchanges of users and data on the web. Endeavours of centralization are also seen in the plans of some actors to propose urbanistic master plans through network infrastructures with the promise of efficiency. Decentralized technologies have been designed with a set of principles and values that contrast with the current political, labor and social ones of today’s world and are potentially the tools for a new phase of informatics. This project proposal elaborates on an action based design research, operating a practical and theoretical inquiry on the roles of decentralized technologies and Peer to Peer networks within creative practices. The research aims to expand these artistic and design fields/practices from a technical perspective/standpoint producing both new knowledge and forms of social scenarios. How could P2P protocols, decentralized technologies and open source principles be used in the context of spatial design practices? How could this impact the current methodologies put in place? How could designers understand then appropriate these technologies for rethinking their workflows or adding them in their toolkit to solve design problems? How can designers’ methods help communicate the challenges of these technologies to the public, outside of academia? P2P Technologies by definition pose contraindications to current political and social dynamics; how are designers being affected by them? What speculative scenarios of collective design work could emerge from decentralized principles? ## Original statement regarding one of the themes of the course I explore digital commoning practices and their relationship to technologies that enable and support them. For instance, BitTorrent technologies enabled the exchange of files as a form of civil disobedience to post-copyright of digital objects such as music, images and books. More recent Peer-to-peer technologies such as IPFS (Interplanetary File System) are enabling the storage of files not in an addressed based manner but content based allowing for a decentralized infrastructure without the main server, challenging the current infrastructure of server-client and by extension demanding current protocols used by networked technologies such as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to be redefined. This allowed for projects such as FreeFoucoult to exist. As part of Sensing Like a (Multipli)City course, I would like to explore how some of the technologies cited above are part of the networked fabric of human and non-human that creates the city. The city that thinks and sees has sensors for developing its techno sensibility but also needs servers (servants) to process, store and calculate data. How could a shift from client-server to peer-to-peer affect its techno sensibility? What new forms of urban commons could sprout as forms of resistance to technologies and dynamics that support/enable data extractivism in the city? In this regard, I would also like to analyse the fundamental configuration of the man-machine trough the visuality of the words server and client within the discourse of informatics and also architecture. ![](https://i.imgur.com/AauMYkb.jpg) ![](https://i.imgur.com/pCyEZWw.jpg) ![](https://i.imgur.com/vX172qA.jpg) **Bibliography** Architecture, Hidden. « Monticello ». Hidden Architecture (blog), 13 septembre 2021. http://hiddenarchitecture.net/monticello/. Krajewski, Markus & Iurascu, I.. (2018). The server: A media history from the present to the Baroque. Richards, Mark, et John Alderman. Core memory: a visual survey of vintage computers featuring machines from the computer history museum. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007. 31.01.2023 **Day 1: CODED AND CODING ENVIRONMENTS** References: - https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5039/Code-SpaceSoftware-and-Everyday-Life - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444319514 - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544511/the-smartness-mandate/ - https://meatspacepress.com/how-to-run-a-company-like-amazon-and-other-fables/ Concepts: - Every epoch has its one dream of virtuality ( metaverse, VR, ) - Containers and ports are physicial manifestations of code - Logistics is a projects of Data Ontology as well - A spatial operating system for shaping the system - Keller Easterling - Smart City is a product that is very related to army and IBM - (https://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com/) - Reconsider what we have and do with that - - Extraction of local resources - From emancipation project in cybersyn to all that be outsourced - The prodction of the known world trough the creation of images - Non linear formats - Hybridity between also the linear (text) - Think about the circulation of the artefact - Takeaways, artefacts to incite discussion and participation. - Pervasive sensing - **Day 2: Augment / Urban Machine Vision and Operational Images** Concepts: - Projective Imagination - Digital Twins - Cybernetics as communications - Vision is also about actively reconstructing - Perception is affected by memories **Day 3: Augment / Urban Machine Vision and Operational Images** https://cities-match-making.studiospatialentities.com/ Concepts: - is not like a picture describes exactly but you create a new simplification within the framework of research. - Agree on the decgress of abstraction.