by Salvatore Iaconesi/Art is Open Source
World Making incorporated is a fictional (yet existing) company with millions of associates, together with an ubiquitous technological system.
Its objective is to create digital city infrastructures in which multiple layers of information become integral part of architecture, creating novel forms of citizenship and defining recombinant, re-programmable public spaces.
World Making incorporated escalates the dialogue between the strategies defined by institutions and the tactics defined by city dwellers, enabling forms of p2p urbanism in which people, objects, spaces and energy/mobility infrastructures interconnect to form a conversational ecosystem in which tactics re-program strategies and promote novel scenarios for city space, societies and the environment.
At World Making incorporated, social network conversations are harvested in real-time, geo-referenced using geo-parsing and geo-coding techniques, and then analyzed using natural language processing techniques, to be classified in order to be able to identify languages, activities, emotional approaches, desires, visions, ideas and expectations of citizens, expressed in the places of their daily lives.
On top of that, an open source set of standards is progressively being built to connect sensors and other devices to energy infrastructures, cars, sidewalks, plants, clothes, so that the city itself can participate to the discussion, by continuously producing information about mobility, energy and the environment.
Furthermore, organizations and citizens can also contribute additional data using a variety of open formats.
All this information is layered upon the city and made freely accessible, in real-time, according to a wide array of possible usage scenarios.
In this way, a multitude of narratives unfold onto the city, helping us to understand how different people, different cultures, different organizations continuously reinterpret, recombine and reprogram the city.