By fabric | ch
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At the invitation of Zhang Ga, curator and director of the TASML Lab at the Tsinghua University in Beijing (joint lab between Parsons School of Design and the Tsinghua University, in fact), to start develop a research project and run a short workshop with the students, I'm currently located for a month approximately alternatively on the campus and in town. The residency will last until mid July and other members of fabric | ch will come later.
We are starting here a new line of project that we've titled (so far) Deterritorialized Living and that will group several projects (Deterritorialized Daylight, Deterritorialized Air, Deterritorialized Heat and Deterritorialized House that will use some of these climatic elements to define a strange house).
The main idea of this project is to take on the emergent and yet almost invisible "icon" of the data center. To take it as a background for our project. A kind of re-emergence of the modern "international" ("ubiquitous"?) idea, transformed: a modern "specter", as Clog mentioned it. We try to question and anaylze it (its centrality, its ambiguous status of privately hosted if not owned people's data, its energy consuption, its heat production, its physical location and use of ressources, its seriality --rack structure--, etc.). But in fact, we want to push its own logic to its end: into a fully deterritorialzed way of living, with permanent --in fact almost useless-- access to (zombie) services and data, out of physical location and time zones. We want to study this situation and produce designs to respond to it.
The workshop part in itself that we are running here is a sub-subject of our own research, it is about inhabiting the computer cabinet or rather the servers cabinet, slightly extended therefore, but still minimal living. The workshop is entitled "Inhabiting the Computer Cabinet, with two suns", but I'll do a dedicated post about this later.
All in all, my own situation here in Beijing for a month gives me the occasion to really experience and analyze my own "deterritorialized" way of living, as I fully rely on software and networks architectures to keep working with the rest of the team in Switzerland (vpn to bypass some digital territorialities, clouds services of all sorts, video calls, file exchanges, etc.), as well as to periodically relocate myself with the help of an american gps service or to speak and exchange with people here.
I really look forward for the results of the workshop and of our own work! So more about it in the coming days/weeks...