SuckDirectRelease
Suck - Direct - Release
Thematic Project by Theo Deutinger, TD Architects, Rotterdam
Rotterdam is taken as exemplary city. The project could be conducted in any city in the Western World.
Seminal questions are: how do we get unique information from the street, process it and put it back onto the street in a newly organized way: suck – direct – release. SUCK information from the streets; DIRECT it, order it and rearrange it and finally RELEASE it again on the streets.
The assignment is to generate interaction between the city of Rotterdam, the Internet and its inhabitants (place / system / people). The crux is to find something of relevance, something of value to gain knowledge at the end of the project. It is possible to interpret or contextualize something apparently useless so that it suddenly assumes great value. The final result – which can be an act, an installation, a poster campaign, or a new program – should alter, change and influence the city and its inhabitants.
In this Thematic Project the mass gets the focus and not the individual. “We are lovin it” instead of “i’m lovin it”; we-phone instead of i-phone, our-space instead of my-space. This project should be not about the individual against the crowd but more about the individual within the crowd.
Rotterdam provides some extreme examples for this. When Feyenoord won the national soccer league in 1998, celebrations went out of hand and looting crowds where rioting in the streets of the city. Afterwards, it was found out that groups had organized this ‘incident’ via mobile phones, making it one of the first spontaneous crowd organizations via mobile media.
SUCK
Start from a hypothesis, a hunch, what you want to do. This hypothesis needs to be supported by evidence provided by newspapers, books, twitter, etc. or your own observation. The hunch can be about any kind of themes and social phenomena: a problem of the city planning department, a crime, a reasonable wish of a community.
SUCK & DIRECT
Map the city – collect the necessary information for your theme and assign it with a location in the city. Go out into the streets and collect unique data that will be processed (= organized according to pre-/ self-defined principles) and brought online as open source (meaning in this respect: in a format that everybody can freely access and alter and add to it). This data set should form the basis of your intervention. The real project will commence when data sets will be combined, eliminated, sorted, enriched, organized, etc. and reinstalled in real space. The collected information is regarded as valuable for ‘the commons’.
A dataset in this regard is everything that can be considered as information. Thus a collection of images, texts, sound etc. is as much a dataset as a string of numbers; information, in this context, is everything that gets processed by the computer into 1 and 0.
If we consider the streets are information channels, all we need to do is to install filters which extract a particular information out of this flow, tapping into the streets.
RELEASE
Release your project in public space in a way that it has the power to alter the data you collected.
Theo Deutinger is the founder and head of TD Architects in Rotterdam. His works include urban and exhibition architectures, software development, and his mapping project Snapshots of Globalisation.
For the schedule, see this page.