ON LOITERING and other forms of in-situ computation

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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, encountering inhabitants and other forms of life, interacting with ubiquitous computing in the wild.

Context

The right to what city?

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 corporations and real-estate interests. All of these issues seem to depend on out-of-scale powers that determine the shape of neighbourhoods and cause some of their inhabitants to be displaced towards the outskirts, making the city a place that is affordable to live in for less and less people. 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?

To approach all of the above, loitering comes in as a mode of being in a place that allows a position from which you can both relate to the city at its micro scale as well as try to understand its macro scale. It is also for this reason that the practice of idling in public spaces has been appreciated and romanticized for at least two centuries through different practices such as the flânerie or the dérive. Loitering inhabits the complexity of the shifting equilibrium of how public space is lived and managed. Literally, it describes just hanging out without a purpose, 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 (apart from a general sense 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 from the point of view of real-estate developers this practice is not listed in the limited range of behaviours that squares and street corners should be dedicated to: shopping, consuming, playing with children, sightseeing or other tourist activites, walking dogs. There is no category that is allowed to idle without a purpose, 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 issue will experiment with loitering as a method to do research in and about the city. It starts from the intuition that when we allow ourselves to be out in public spaces without a defined purpose, we open up to unplanned encounters with a dense fabric of human relations, economic vectors and technical networks. The proposal then 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. Many of us today have computers in our pockets most of the time, and the streets and squares are full with different networks and other forms of computation, too. This coming three months will then be dedicated to explore together the possibilities to compute and publish while being outdoors.

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 1

Monday April 8th

• 11:00 - 16:00: KICK-OFF SI-24, meeting in the large WH4.316??

Tuesday 9. April 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Joseph and Louisa
  • Microcontroller 101 - session 1

Wednesday 10. April 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Kick-off: Methods class with Steve, Lídia and Marloes
  • Project that May or May not be Made (PMoMM) - https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/RapidPrototypeandProject_that_May
  • Personal Reader
  • Rapid Prototypes

Week 2

Monday April 15th

Alex Zakkas is joining us.

The contemporary city is the setting for plenty of observations made by many different actors. A few observers at work, right now:

• Plastic tube pressure sensor on cycling path to count bikes,
• Pigeon waiting for crumbs to fall from a kebab,
• Intrusion-detection lamp post in lombardijen security fieldlab,
• Self-scanning cassa at AH,
• Water quality sensor in the canal.

In this session we will join the ranks of the street observers, a role that against common sense, it does not result in a distance from what is observed. This activity can changes one's mode of relation to its environment, bringing them to notice patterns of passerbys and of the other observers in place, suggesting the conditions to interact.

Tuesday 16. April 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Joseph and Louisa
  • Microcontroller 101 - session 2

Wednesday 17. April 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Steve

Week 3

Monday April 22th

Louisa is joining!

This session will explore the relations between city and play, and play here is meant in at least two related senses: both as in performing a role on the urban stage, and as a set of written and unwritten rules that every inhabitant plays along, consciously or not. Can other games can be played in the same setting, do people set their own rules for the urban space, temporarily or in small groups? Can other people be detourned from their usual rules and involved into a new game? What special role does spatial location and positioning play in most of the city's games and why? And what is this new game called smart-city?

Tuesday 23. April 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Joseph and Louisa
  • Microcontroller 101 - session 3

Wednesday 24. April 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Lídia

Week 4

☀️ May Holiday! ☀️

Week 5

Monday May 6th

Aggeliki Diakrousi is joining us.

If we were to make a ranking of the most surveyed of the five senses in public spaces, after 1.Sight which of course maintains the primacy thanks to the multiple flavours of cameras and CCTVs, 2.Sound would be runner-up, for the attentions it receives from the industry that develops technologies of crime-deterrence and crowd-control. There is a wide range of means available depending on the need: sensors to prevent crimes by listening to street noises, sonic emissions that promise to discipline bodies, shopping-boosting sound-scapes that will enhance sales. In this session we will look more closely to one sound technology that applies a filter of inclusion and exclusion to certain hangout places, and we will try and research together what it means politically and socially as a form of nudge.

Tuesday 7. May 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Louisa

Wednesday 8 May 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Lídia

Week 6

Monday May 13th 17:00-23:00

Davide Tidoni is joining us.

Following up on our previous focus on sound, we turn for this session from the perspectives of passive listeners and listened subjects, to the ones of active makers of noises, and of attentive listeners of the sound-spaces that surround us. By carefully listening, we shift into a particular mode of openness to space, another way to relate to our surroundings. This session will take place later in the day, so to give us the chance to enjoy together the shift of places to the more quiet time of the day, and to pay attention to the different paradigms and regimes that switch on as the sky gets dark.

Tuesday 14. May 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Joseph

Wednesday 15 May 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Steve

Week 7

Tuesday 21. May 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Louisa

Wednesday 22 May 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Lídia

Week 8

Monday May 27th

maxigas is joining us.

Metropolitan areas host the highest concentrations of infrastructures, stacked high upon each other. From deep into the ground with sewers, pipelines, cable conduits and micro-trenches, going up into the sky through hanging wires and antennas across the whole radio spectrum, we stand on and are traversed by infras of all kinds. In this session we will pay a special attention to them, getting into ways to notice, track and study them, trying to grasp the economical and political stakes they represent and render materially, figuring out possible ways to interact with them.

Tuesday 28. May 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Joseph

Wednesday 29 May 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Steve

Week 9

Tuesday 4.June 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Louisa

Wednesday 5 June 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Lídia

Week 10

Monday June 10th

Imane B. K. is joining us.

Tuesday 11. June 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Joseph

Wednesday 12 June 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Steve

Week 11

Tuesday 18. June 2024 - Prototyping - 10:00 - 17:00

• Prototyping with Louisa

Wednesday 19 June 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Lídia

Week 12

Tuesday June 25th

• 10-11: 1 hour debrief (tbd)
• 11-17: Prototyping with Joseph & Louisa

Wednesday 26 June 2024 - Methods - 11:00 - 17:00

• Methods class with Steve and Lídia

Thursday June 27th

• Opening Grad Show @ Worm Slash Gallery, possibility for (small) presentation of project.