2022-03-06
2022-03-06
Infrastructure
It was a cloudy Sunday. A cold breeze, mixed with sparsely dense snow, has never given up on us. We had to light up the fire in the main living room sooner than expected, so we had breakfast all together in front of the fireplace. With Federico, we spent the morning organising the contents for an upcoming presentation of Habitats’ infrastructure at Natural Intelligence, the third part of FIBER’s Reassemble Lab in Amsterdam, which “will explore alternative internet infrastructures based on earthly dynamics, low-carbon solutions and ecological ethics”. (https://www.fiber-space.nl/project/natural-intelligence/). An occasion to present what has been done so far in terms of infrastructure over the last few months. For instance, our .index and related webpages are hosted on a server installed in Cà de Monti, specifically in the main living room. We are able to connect to the World Wide Web through a small parabolic antenna, installed outside one of the village building. This antenna uses an FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) service, a technology that uses long-range wifi, ideal for areas that are not densely populated, like ours, where 5g and 4g connections work only for one provider. Fast responses, as much as full-time availability, should be deprioritised. This approach to content fruition embraces the local conditions, thus promoting other forms of sociability and sharing, no longer relying on infrastructural performativity, but rethinking alternative and experimental ways of inter-connecting local and therefore ultra-territorial meanings. The Tramazzo Valley is a small, standing-alone valley whose infrastructures speak back to its morphology. A scarce constellation of antennas spread out the rural area, mainly covered by woods and fields. Some shaded areas escape the continuous stream of the global connectivity - provided by antennas’ signals, delineating rare and often threatened free spaces for the agency to redefine predetermined fruibility conditions. Spaces that need to be protected, saved from hyper-connectivity rhythms.
