ON LOITERING and other forms of in-situ computation

loiter (v.)
early 15c., "idle one's time, dawdle over work;" perhaps from or akin to Middle Dutch loteren "be loose or erratic, shake, totter" like a loose tooth or a sail in a storm; in modern Dutch, leuteren "to delay, linger, loiter over one's work".

A proposal to observe and engage with the city in its shifting technological and social contexts, by spending time in public and semi-private spaces, finding ways to execute digital and performative scripts, interacting with ubiquitous computing in the wild.

Context

The right to what?

It is around us and under our foots, plenty of networks are growing and changing at the street level, from critical state run infrastructures, to lightweight parasitical on-demand networks such as electric scooters. In the contemporary city, spectacular investment-driven discourses like the one of smart city encounter the long-term material economy of housing-stock administration and real-estate interests. All of this, seem to be out-of-scale powers that determine the form of neighbourhoods and cause some of their inhabitants to move out towards the outskirts, making the city a place that is affordable to live in to a declining range of forms of life. At the micro level, though, things are still possible, housing struggles are still fought and sometimes won, networks and power dynamics can be engaged with and subverted, and, most importantly, the current lively and livable aspect of cities can be enjoyed by many different people and communities.

Loitering?

That's why loitering. This mode of encounter is the most indicated to both relate to the city at its micro scale and understand its macro scale, and has been for centuries appreciated and romanticized through different practices (flaneurs, derives, etc). Loitering inhabits the complexity of the shifting equilibriums of how public space is lived and managed. Literally, it describes hanging out in the public space, but under a negative light, signaling that it is not a neutral practice, but a strangely conflictual one. By definition, there is nothing wrong with loitering in itself (if we exclude a general aura of inefficiency) but it is often described as a prelude to unwanted behaviors: vandalism, noise, drug use, small crime, etc. Those fears combine well with the fact that for real estate developers there is a limited range of approved behaviours for which squares and street corners should be available to: shopping, consuming, playing with children, sightseeing or other tourist activites, walking dogs. There is no category that is allowed to idle, except maybe the one of retired and older people, but only as long as they do not also sleep in the streets.

In practice?

The plan for this trimester is to find appropriate spots to loiter in and around Rotterdam, spend some time in company of its networks and its inhabitants, and find suitable ways to develop, execute and alter scripts for the public space. Coincidentally, most of us today have computers in our pockets, and the public space is ubiquitously full with different networks and other forms of computation, too. This gives plenty of possibilities to compute and publish while outdoors, that we will explore during the trimester.

People

This Issue is guest edited by Martino Morandi with contributions by Alex Zakkas, Aggeliki Diakrousi, maxigas, Louisa Teichmann, Davide Tidoni, Imane B. K.

Schedule

Week 2

Monday April 15th

Alex Zakkas is joining us.

Week 4

☀️ May Holiday! ☀️

Week 5

Monday May 6th

Aggeliki Diakrousi is joining us.

Week 6

Monday May 13th

Davide Tidoni is joining us.

Week 8

Monday May 27th

maxigas is joining us.

Week 10

Monday June 10th

Image B. K. is joining us.