As part of GIDEST’s March 3, 2017, “Our Own Devices” workshop on ethnographic tools and techniques, I responded to Alberto CorsĂn JimĂ©nez’s paper, “Ethnography: A Prototype.” Here are my comments:
An impassioned political preamble seems obligatory in even the most modest of academic addresses these days. Iâm going to skip it â but I will say this: As so much of the world is wondering what forms of collective action and communication resonate amidst so much political and epistemological upheaval, Alberto CorsĂn JimĂ©nez and Adolfo Estalella offer a model for thinking recursively about how we constitute and act as publics â particularly as publics in cities, which are commonly our stages for political action and are now, some believe, the only remaining spatial scale at which we can work to maintain âsanctuariesâ for democratic ideals.
Drawing on work in the free and open-source software community, JimĂ©nez and Estalella propose that the communityâs commitment to sharing, to the commons, and to the âdemocratizing potential of technologyâ can be productively, if not seamlessly, transferred to the urban realm. The software developerâs operational unit, the âprototype,â is also of potential utility for ethnographers and other researchers, whether theyâre studying software and urbanism, or not.
The prototype is a proof-of-concept meant to be built upon. Itâs a model from which we can construct things, ideas, publics, and politics. Itâs a technical form and a social form encompassing a methodology, an epistemology, an ontology, and even an ideology. In free culture communities, the prototype embodies openness and adaptability, and it calls for iteration and transference. Our authors describe the Inteligencias Colectivas, for instance, who are interested in âevolutionizingâ urban prototypical forms and knowledges. They acknowledge the âarchitectural intelligences behind mundane objects,â then imagine their âresonances, extensions, and analogiesâ in other contexts and environments. The portability of the prototype renders it more widely accessible, thereby potentially democratizing design â but only if the design is effectively communicated, rendered intelligible and actionable, to other communities. Thus, JimĂ©nez notes, the archive is an integral ingredient of the prototype; itâs the âur-design,â the âinfra-ontologyâ of the prototype. The archive captures not only a prototypeâs composition, but also its âbiographyâ: its historical contexts, its evolution, its social relations of production and use.
Different kinds of objects and practices call for different forms of documentation. To be rendered âfully legible,â JimĂ©nez says, âsome intelligences require a multi-layered combination of iconographic techniques,â like photographs, sketches, and video recordings. The choice of particular files, formats, and languages depends not only on their representational affordances and pedagogical potential, but also their politics: proprietary software and restrictive file formats, for instance, would limit a prototypeâs accessibility and mutability and contradict the whole open-source ethos. The ethnographerâs experimentation with such a range of modalities in his or her own work likewise represents an aesthetic and political choice â to extend ethnographic work into what Michael Fischer calls âthird spaces of articulation.â
While we learned from our MakerBot fetish phase that prototyping doesnât always elicit criticality, it does have the potential to engender self-reflexivity, to create what Christopher Kelty calls ârecursive publicsâ: publics that are âvitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal,⊠and conceptual means of [their] own existence as a public.â In their conscious choices of democratic, egalitarian modes of action and communication, he says, they âspeak to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.â One would like to think that scholars and reflective practitioners are also âvitally concernedâ with the material conditions of their own knowledge and cultural production, but this of course isnât always the case: we turn a blind eye to our underpaid adjuncts, indebted graduate students, and the free editorial labor and exorbitant subscription fees that sustain our scholarly publishing systems. Yet JimĂ©nez and Estalella found that their fieldwork with free culture activists in Madrid required a âform of ethnography that takes its own changing infrastructure as an object of inquiry.â We all would do well to consider how the evolving technological and social infrastructures of the academy, of our disciplines â and the larger culture within which they exist â necessitate new knowledge infrastructures, new methods and modes of dissemination. JimĂ©nez and Estalella felt compelled to transform their study of free culture prototypes into âa prototype for free culture itself.â Through their âTaking Critique Out for a Walkâ series, they talked about the city while talking through it, and they sought means to âopen-source the very architecture of education.â Such recursive thinking generated for them new modes of scholarly practice and publicity.
Iâd argue that recursion should involve âvital concernâ not only with the methods and political-economic conditions of oneâs own practice â but also with the temporal depth of that recursivity. Whatâs the history of recursionâs loop? Whatâs the prototype of the prototype? We tend to metaphorize complicated systems â like cities and brains â in terms of the prevailing technologies of the time. At various points weâve likened cognition and urban operations to the workings of hydraulic or electrical systems, or computers. And we often draw parallels between these two ur-metaphors: cities seem to work an awful lot like computers, and computer programmers draw inspiration from architecture. When we see free and open culture in our cities, it bears a resemblance to open-source software.
Over the past two decades, weâve seen several iterations â prototypes, we might say â of open-source architecture and urban design. Paperhouses and Wikihouses offer freely available, modifiable plans. Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena has released four of his âhalf-a-houseâ designs into the public domain, allowing for their unrestricted use and adaptation. Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudels proposed their own model of âopen source architectureâ in 2011, and, before them, Architecture for Humanityâs Cameron Sinclair aimed to bring open-source principles to humanitarian design. In the early aughts, Usman Haque experimented with open-source architecture using inflatables, and then he and Matthew Fuller joined forces to prototype an âUrban Versioning System.â In 2003, Dennis Kaspori proposed an âopen source [design] practiceâ that allows for the âcollective,â iterative and evolutionary âdevelopment of solutions for spatial issues involving housing, mobility, greenspace, urban renewal, and so on.â Heâs speaking free cultureâs language.
Even well before the age of open-source, in the 1970s, Cedric Price prototyped his anticipatory architecture, and Christopher Alexander offered up his âpattern language,â which was also built on principles of democratic (albeit moralistic), evolutionary design. Stewart Brand, meanwhile, supplied a whole host of prototypes for living in his Whole Earth Catalog. And having been raised in Amish country in Pennsylvania, and having attended a few barn raisings in my time, Iâd say the Amish have been prototyping free and open-source design for a few centuries. Without autoCAD. Rahul Mehrotra tells of similarly-minded design principles at the Kumbh Mela Hindu pilgrimage, which involves the construction of a massive, modular temporary city every several years â and which has, for well over a millennium, embraced evolutionary, recombinant, accessible, recursive practices.
Itâs also helpful to recall that the widespread use of architectural and urban plans are a relatively recent phenomenon, as architectural historian Mario Carpo argues. Before the rise of print, designers were also craftsmen, and they typically spread ideas orally and learned their trade through apprenticeships. The idea of the architect as a professional wielding specialized drawings is a product of new professional organizations and curricula, like that at the Ăcole des Beaux Arts, founded in the 19th century. As Michael Guggenheim argues, throughout much of history, âpeople could invent products at home, or produce ad-hoc solutions to practical problemsâŠwith a piece of wood and some nails. The problem,â he says, âis rather, that there are few historical sources andâŠlittle historical interest in these processes, since they do not lend themselves to the writing of histories.â[1]
Recognizing this long history of prototypes to the prototype serves not only to remind us of the historical specificity of our contemporary metaphors, like the city-as-software, but also to highlight the way those metaphors shape particular urban practices and epistemologies and politics. Those metaphors also determine how knowledges are documented and transformed into historical sources for future archival researchers â and into manuals and âinstructablesâ for contemporary practitioners. If a city is a computer, and if its urban practices are executed like software, the archive of those urban intelligences is more likely to adopt a computational logic, too.
The Ciudad Escuela web platform invites free culture projects to âopen the âsourcesâ of their own technical, legal, pedagogical, associative and political capacities,â to render them legible through those âmulti-layeredâŠiconographic techniquesâ we discussed earlier. Theyâre encouraged to âlegitimize their practices vis-Ă -vis local authorities and neighboring communitiesâ by âexplicating and standardizing [their] tacit urban knowledge,â and by âverifyingâ their skills with Mozillaâs Open Badges technology. But what does it mean to tie legitimation to standardization? What happens when particular cultures â embodied, situated, perhaps performative or oral, or governed by codes of privacy â translate their knowledge into the archival logics of the web and the credentialing economies of civic tech. Do we restrict what constitutes urban knowledge and its ârepertoireâ if it has to make itself iconographic: YouTube-able, diagram-able, data-visualizable?[2]
Iâd encourage us to also think recursively about the technological metaphors we use to make sense of things like urban cultures, or to explain the methods and media we employ as scholars and practitioners. Those metaphors embody epistemologies and politics that recursively reinscribe themselves in the archive. If culture is software, our cultural institutions and infrastructures â from universities to urban âlaboratoriesâ â seem like computers. And any knowledges that happen to be in the wrong file format just might not compute.
[1] Free urban culture has been around for quite some time, too: consider the centuriesâ-long history of public libraries, mechanicsâ institutions, athenaeums â many of which promoted the democratization of productive knowledge, itself a prototype for âmaker culture.â
[2] Weâve come to recognize that universal transparency and openness are not universal goods â particularly for vulnerable populations, indigenous groups, and marginalized communities. Visibility, openness can offer legitimation, but it can also invite exploitation.