The aim of the research-by-design project The Hackable City is to develop a research agenda and toolkit that explores the role of digital media technologies for new directions for urban planning and city-making. How can citizens, design professionals, local government institutions and others creatively use digital technologies in collaborative processes of urban planning and management? The project seeks to connect developments of, on the one hand, city municipalities that develop smart-city policies and testing these in ‘urban living labs’ and, on the other hand, networked smart-citizen initiatives of people innovating and shaping their own living environments. In this contribution we look at how self-builders in urban lab Buiksloterham in Amsterdam have become ‘hackers’ of their own city, cleverly shaping the future development of a brownfield neighbourhood in Amsterdam’s northern quarter.
DOCUMENT
At the end of the 20th century, hacking was bleeding edge. When the ideas, practices and pranks of this experimental niche of technophiles attracted the attention of a handful of activists in Italy, they understood that information and communication were what would give shape and voice to social, political, and cultural processes in the near future.+KAOS is a cut and paste of interviews, like a documentary film transposed on paper. It describes the peculiar relationship between hacktivism and activism, in Italy and beyond, highlighting the importance of maintaining digital infrastructures. While this may not sound as glamorous as sneaking into a server and leaking data, it is a fundamental topic: not even the most emblematic group of hacktivists can operate without the services of radical server collectives.
MULTIFILE
Martijn de Waal is a senior researcher at the lectorate of Play and Civic Media and a member of the Citizen Data Lab at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Hetis the author of The City as Interface. How Digital Media Are Changing the City (2014), and the project leader of The Hackable City research project. He is also the co-founder of TheMobileCity.nl an international think tank that since 2007 addressed the relation between digital media and urbanism. His most recent book, co-authored with José van Dijck and Thomas Poell – only available in Dutch – is The Platform Society. The Struggle for Public Value in an Onlie World (2016).
DOCUMENT
Connecting Otherwise is an artistic/design research project initiated by The Hmm and the research department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Instituut, alongside a consortium of invited stakeholders from the creative industries and research institutions such as Small File Media Festival, Hackers & Designers, and Stichting LINK. It focuses on the development of interdisciplinary workshop formats exploring regenerative aesthetics and the materiality of digital technologies through hands-on and collective research approaches. Drawing on feminist and decolonial hacking principles and critical making, the project's aim is to make tangible and reimagine digital materiality while resisting extractive tendencies. Promoting regenerative design principles, it addresses the environmental impact of digital technologies and resource depletion, emphasizing art and design’s role in tackling these challenges. We believe the intersectional character of such challenges requires collective and interdisciplinary approaches to design and art making, which are rarely fostered conceptually and practically within the creative industries and educational institutions. The workshops build upon the expertise of the collaborating partners, who bring together art, design, technology, and education and have been instrumental in bridging art and science, supporting artists and designers in contributing to interdisciplinary research environments. Via a series of interconnected workshops the project will engage art and design professionals, educators, and students in material-based research around the social and environmental impact of digital technologies. Participants will explore circuit-making through community craft traditions, embrace ‘slowness’ and ‘lowness’ as frugal and regenerative principles for digital design and art making, and use weaving as a framework for exploring interconnected digital and territorial relationships. The aim is to creatively and critically examine the challenges that (future) art and design practitioners in the creative industries face when building and participating in contemporary digital culture in ways that are both sustainable and equitable.
