the images (see previous blog) are an important thing. the obey sticker - urban tagging, informal proliferation; the berlin wall - transformation of symbols/shifting understanding of the landmark; the public billboard - agency through communication.
the idea is to create some kind of tag, informally deployed in the urban space of Jerusalem. it would be more than a just a sticker (a signifier). it would have a technology/connectivity component. basically it would be a processor, a transceiver, a small amount of memory (512K - 1G to start) and a power source. Networked, these would become a distributed dataspace and source of bandwidth.
as simple as this?
The network would aggregate in the urban space according to some collective, emergent logic (think OBEY), filling in dross space most likely (like OBEY). they would construct a distributed, anonymous data/communication haven. with sufficient aggregation, they activate, and start broadcasting, providing access to anonymous bandwidth. people can tap into this, communicate through it and store data on it, setting up new relationships between the populous and the urban space.
first of all, this offers a new way to conceive of landmarks in an urban space. The aggregation of these nodes would create some kind of effect on the urban landscape, on particular zones in the urban landscape, opening up new niches for socio-cultural interaction, allowing for pollination across existing cultural divides, setting up a space for the reconsideration of the collective narrative and contested history.
more importantly, and much more speculatively, the network presents the possibility of the becoming and evolution of socio-cultural "shields" in the contested urban landscape. If the network could become sufficiently essential to the social-biological functioning of people, to everyone in Jerusalem, Israeli and Palestinian, it would become impossible to dismantle (think about the lack of potency of the government in the face of the worm in Shockwave Rider) The government, the defense forces, the suicide bombers, anyone, really, would be dissuaded from destruction because they might risk crashing this distributed network, embedded in the urban fabric. blow up a bomb in the wrong spot, the whole techno-social system blows up in your face. of course, this brings up all kinds of issues - but design issues - which is a good thing...
immediate questions come to mind:
do people know these tags have this embedded technology while they are proliferating them? or do they come online at some date, with some event, according to some rule...?
how is this bandwidth used? is it a bad thing that a terrorist can use it to communicate/plot? how do you interface with this network (mobile devices, on the internet, through human interface (sight, touch, gesture, inhabitation, etc)?
what do these things look like? do they do anything other than network/memory? do they have some kind of signage like OBEY?
and on and on...
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