reSync set out on an ambitious programme of activity to mark it’s establishment as a startup company, picking up where deckspace.tv rounded off it’s research phase in Leuneburg.

To begin we formed a collaboration with the Freifunk Leuneburg group and invited them to join us for a few days preparation and two days of festivities on the Leuphana University campus.

Lunatic festival is held each year and operated by students of all faculties in the University as part of an enlightened in-house work experience period for second and third years. We first met with previous years chief co-ordinators at sessions in Freiraum during 2012 where we first proposed our involvement and set up the process for the following years festival. They estimated 2000 visitors a day would attend to share the love of summer and end of term!

With our invitation in hand we promoted Freifunk Leuneburg as wireless infrastructure providers at the festival an ambitious but achievable prospect and one which drew in some great characters from the local group all of whom chose to work above and beyond the call to put in place the physical and radio interlinks as well as install and test the dozen wireless access points required to put a universal access network into place for everyone to use.

To reSync Lunatic, we set up an array of pre-configured Bit Torrent Sync secrets to facilitate file synchronising between attendees at the festival via qrcode graphics printed on a series of custom button badge artwork sheets. Each Lunatic (festival visitor) claimed a badge from us and pressed it together in our workshop, along with it’s write access ‘secret’ enabling them to present sounds texts and images from their smartphone to anyone willing to scan their badge and at any location in the festival area.

We all then setup camp in a quiet corner of the spielwiese and proceeded to monitor the useage of the wireless network and respond to the increasingly engaged festival goers requesting a reSync badge and support to get their smartphones sync ready and activated.

Participatory actions and drifts for the post-digital city

New Babylon was a model of an utopian city of the architect Constant. It was based on the idea of a constantly developing network of units that can allow dynamic and playful interactions among the city and its inhabitants. Although the New Babylon was a city that was never built, a part of Constant’s thought seems to have been now realised in the most contradictory way. Life in the “smart cities” seems to have an open, participatory and playful character aiming for the constant optimisation, normalisation and predictability of urban everyday life. Constant connectivity and the continuous aggregation and use of urban data can not leave much of a space for unpredictable, ephemeral and free forms of communication and interaction. And while in the post-digital era the romanticised idea of the connected city seems to be left behind, the urge once again appears for the location and redefinition of the elements that can offer opportunities for unitary thought and collective action.

The project New Babylon Revisited invites to Athens artists and theorists who through their workshops and actions will propose new architectures of connectivity and re-examine the city’s infrastructures. As part of the overall project, the studios and offices of a building in Praxitelous street will be connected through a pneumatic network of tubes; a city drift will invite visitors to a free exchange of files; a discussion around the enclosures of the Athenian commons will be hosted in an offline sharing network; a parasitic micro-conference on the move will re-approach Athens and an ephemeral radio station at Mavromichali street will work as an open and accessible network, addressing a call for discussions and actions. E-book.