Code, Layers, Infrastructures

8 players sit on a large net on the ground. Most of them have colorful balls of yard in their hands and are busy with weaving it into the net right where they sit. Some cozy couches are in the background.

Physical game & workshop, 2019 in New Delhi India during HKW’s The New Alphabet School at the Common Room, with Kamran Behrouz, Ren Loren Britton, Jörn Röder. Photos by Annette Jacob.

Current centralized, entangled corporeal and governmental internet infrastructures tend towards exploitation and surveillance. By experimenting with embodying and coding networks that are decentral, anonymous, temporary, specific and/or collective, we contributed to the digital commons. Together, participants used the metaphor of the layer to question existing networked structures and to collectively imagine alternative tools of navigation. Starting from the everyday layers of computational networks, we went on a computational walk in the neighborhood and played through different network types and applications.

In the physical game, humans play as the cats of the internet. As cats, they play through three network types: centralized, decentralized and distributed. Contact between cats can be established by meowing, and connections are formed by throwing balls of yarn to one another and weaving it into an existing grid. For example, in the centralized networks, all cats have to address central cat, who sits in the middle of the network. After playing, the cats decide which network type they prefer.

A bright net is photographed from the side, with yellow, red, and blue yarn woven in and out of the grid. The different strings form nodes in positions where many strings meet. Close to the camera, there is a big heap of yellow yarn on the floor with many strings reaching back into the net.

A group of people from our workshop group is standing in a circle in a Delhi street and discussing internet infrastructure. People around us gaze seem interested and look at us.

The photo is taken over the shoulder of a workshop participant who is holding the instructions for the physical game in their hands. Only the headline, Network Rules, can be read, with two emojis of a cat and a call of yarn printed above.