The workshop explores unstable infrastructures and alternative networks throughout history. Technological protocols and power structures, trade routes from the original Silk Road to the Darknet, ubiquitous computing and sensory environments, early postal systems between Thurn & Taxis and the Butchers’ Post, Jesuit information networks, but also the networks of signifiers and mathemes that constitute them: graph theory, topology, and knots.
The morning and early afternoon sessions will be accompanied by some readings. The workshop closes with a hands-on crypto workshop (bring your laptops and phones).
In his novel The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon tells the story of Tristero, an underground organization with post-boxes disguised as regular waste-bins using _W.A.S.T.E. _as an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire.