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ADS8: Data Matter: Digital Networks, Data Centres & Posthuman Institutions

Lara de Villiers

Lara is an MA Architecture graduate from the Royal College of Art. Following on from the completion of her undergraduate degree at Manchester School of Architecture, Lara continued to live and work in Manchester, completing her Part I placement with HTA Design LLP.

Whilst at the RCA, her research has looked at financialised networks and consequential questions of social inequality. Her work examines the mechanisms behind these networks with the intention of questioning the boundaries of the governing and financial systems we inhabit today. In doing so, her work aims to give space to, and promote, social movements.

In her first year, she studied with ADS2: The Popular, where she interrogated policy surrounding the financialisation of community benefits within the UK construction industry. Her work included a collective research project, led by Public Practice, exploring alternative methods for local authorities to implement suburban intensification. Whilst her dissertation examined urban organisation, planning policies and subsequent spatial inequalities of Johannesburg, South Africa. 


In her second year, she studied with ADS8: Data Matters, where her thesis project examines the impact of transterritorial infrastructure entanglements on the domestic environment of Tunisia. Her work is interested in the social movements that have emerged and developed as a result of these entanglements and the subsequent effects on the labour market. In doing so, the project considers the extra territorial relationship between Tunisia and Italy, focusing on the liminal space of their maritime border as an opportunistic spatial condition.

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Degree Details

School of Architecture

ADS8: Data Matter: Digital Networks, Data Centres & Posthuman Institutions

Throughout her MA, Lara has developed a critical approach to her areas of interest through the use of first hand research and analytical tools. Specifically during her second year, the use of mapping became a means of synthesising her research into visual content and understanding a geographically distinct site. Furthermore, the unprecedented times we find ourselves in has led her to explore animation as a new mode of digital representation for complex scenarios.

Whilst Lara will continue with her Part II placement, she finds herself fascinated by the spatial implications resulting from the entanglements of infrastructural and geopolitical relationships. Consequently, she looks forward to developing her research and the practice she has begun to build this year, working in a multidisciplinary [and collaborative] manner.

Tunisia's Sociopolitical and Infrastructural Landscape

Tunisia's Sociopolitical and Infrastructural Landscape

Infrastructures of the Strait

[extra]networking explores the contradictory relationship between globalisation and border regimes in the production of an opportunistic spatial condition within the liminal zone of the Sicilian Strait maritime border.
The project explores this relationship through an examination of the existing frameworks of extra territorial governance, and consequently its potential subversion, through the lens of political entanglement within the digital, energy and extractive infrastructures that exist between Tunisia and Italy. These infrastructures are physical manifestations of Tunisia's economic strategies, and the consequences of this extra territorialisation become evident in the spatialisation of financial flows and the asymmetrical distribution of domestic capital within Tunisia.


This asymmetry in question was brought to light in the year 2012, following the Arab Spring Revolution, when the Tunisian Court of Auditors produced a report which exposed the structural corruption that existed within the country’s gas and oil industry. The report ignited a new wave of social movements within the country as it became a means of State accountability.


With the country possessing one of the most modernised digital networks in North Africa, the 2G network became further politicised through social media use in the organisation of civil resistance movements. However, as the bandwidths of all Tunisian ISP’s are leased through a singular state agency, the ability to operate securely and independently has been and is still fundamentally compromised.


In this context, the Strait operates, simultaneously and inversely, as the connection and the separation of Tunisia and Italy - with its bed of subsea cables and pipelines physically manifesting as a tangible representation of the various political entanglements. The ambiguities that surround border conditions become amplified within maritime settings - when the border is interrogated, the precisely plotted boundary line, becomes a 1.18km wide area of convoluted sovereignty and jurisdiction; thus producing the border as space of extra territorial potentiality.


This potentiality is explored through the proposal of an independent data storage network within the thickness of the border line itself. The project translates the transterritorial entanglements through a singular object - the data buoy - which operates as a mechanism to support the established civil resistance culture of Tunisia.

Medium:

animation, mapping
BordersDataDigitalInfrastructureNetworkTerritories
The Network — Occupying a 100 x 100m grid, the network arrangement consists of a series of data storage points, each one being identifiable by a buoy. The grid forms the basis for the spatial organisation of the system as they operate in a mesh network that ensures it is fully redundant. The non rigid mooring of the system allowing the buoys to move between territorial waters and the liminal zone further breaking down the notion of territoriality. The mesh network accounts for the shifting locations, ensuring connection as it allows each point to connect non-hierarchically and thus becomes a self healing system.
Environmental Implications of Data Storage — Tunisia is currently struggling to meet its own electricity demands, with the growing digital economy placing an even greater strain on its grid. Furthermore, the production of electricity within the country functions in what will become a redundant system, with 94% of the country’s electricity being produced through hydrocarbons. Despite their abundance of solar, creating a financial and environmentally unsustainable system. Offshoring the proposal enables it to mitigate the heavy energy requirements for data storage and thus become non reliant on Tunisia’s problematic system.
Mechanisms for Operation — The intention is for the maintenance of them to be managed by the Tunisian fisherman of Cap Bon. They have an intimate knowledge of the Strait and this alternative means of employment intends to aid in the mitigation of the decreased fishing economy which is a result of climate breakdown and subsequent reduced fishing stock numbers. The buoys play on the language and scale of heavy marine infrastructure and through a process of standardisation and scale consideration of material components, the fishermen would be able to transport materials on existing vessels and carry out works without extensive additional knowledge.
Wayfinding Devices — In this heavily travailed crossing, the presence of the buoy lights signify the median point of the Strait and thus become a way finding device in this highly contentious area of the Mediterranean. Using GPS coordinate tracking, the changing colour of the lights indicates the position of the buoy within the border space with green signifying an area of suspended jurisdiction and orange marking the edges of that zone. Through this, the network is able to exploit its independent position within the liminal border zone and subsequently engage with the wider entanglements of the Mediterranean.

Medium:

animation, mapping

HTA Design LLP

Website:

https://www.hta.co.uk/

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