Workshop / Public Intervention
2014
Global Tools at SALT offers three workshops on construction, communication and survival, all critical topics within the multidisciplinary experimental program of design education founded in italy in 1973.
While current discourses around urbanism and communication seem largely concerned with efficiency and optimality of performance, during the workshop, we will explore alternative narratives between the street and media technology. we will try to challenge the vision of a top-down, all-sensing city of the future. we will look for discourses which are lived in the mobility of perceptions, we will decode the polyphonic voices which are interwoven between the city and the social web. activists, artists, and designers will take the place of the technocrati-elite – and the security agency – in a sort of group therapy, as they manipulate data and infrastructure to craft escape plans for the medium and its users. we will explore residual degrees of freedom from inside the architecture of social media, appropriating commercial tools, subverting their inherent logic, filters and controls. participants will tinker with a “decoding toolkit” - pieces of software installed on raspberry pi boards, which harvest geo-localized content from twitter, manipulate text, produce audio. the transformation of data flows into fully visible (or better: audible) agents provides a possible model for opening up to new forms of civic and aesthetic engagement with communications and the city.
While current discourses around urbanism and communication seem largely concerned with efficiency and optimality of performance, during the workshop, we will explore alternative narratives between the street and media technology. we will try to challenge the vision of a top-down, all-sensing city of the future. we will look for discourses which are lived in the mobility of perceptions, we will decode the polyphonic voices which are interwoven between the city and the social web. activists, artists, and designers will take the place of the technocrati-elite – and the security agency – in a sort of group therapy, as they manipulate data and infrastructure to craft escape plans for the medium and its users. we will explore residual degrees of freedom from inside the architecture of social media, appropriating commercial tools, subverting their inherent logic, filters and controls. participants will tinker with a “decoding toolkit” - pieces of software installed on raspberry pi boards, which harvest geo-localized content from twitter, manipulate text, produce audio. the transformation of data flows into fully visible (or better: audible) agents provides a possible model for opening up to new forms of civic and aesthetic engagement with communications and the city.
Curated by Silvia Franceschini and Valerio Borgonuovo
Produzione industriale e creatività individuale. Scena 7 (1973) Courtesy Lapo Binazzi
Produzione industriale e creatività individuale. Scena 7 (1973) Courtesy Lapo Binazzi