IMD _Institute of Media and Design
copyright _IMD
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN | Hacking Berlin Teufelsberg
PRISM - the name of the NSA surveillance program is on everyone's lips since disclosure by the U.S. intelligence officials Edward Snowden.
While states and corporations are working on the technical requirements to expand their reach to access our digital communications, citizens and government are behaving noticeably quiet. This may also be due to the technical inaccessibility of the subject. More importantly, that people who have the necessary expertise are active and not working on behalf of businesses or intelligence agencies - for example, the "Hackers" who can explain, evaluate, and can re-program the technical connections.
A design for a public visible place of exchange is needed, a base and starting point for a community which increasingly opposes the monitoring and storing of our private communications. What ideal do we want for a self-determined communal life together? How could a counter-image to algorithmically calculated predictability of the future of each individual be presented and architecturally transported, especially here, on the site of the former monitoring station of the American security agency NSA?
The usability of the existing buildings is to be reviewed and structurally re-thought:
Where formerly secrecy, limited accessibility and hierarchically ordered flow of information determined the spatial organization, an architectonic-structural equivalent should be designed for an open, communicative and non-hierarchical community. The existing geodesic domes protecting the former eavesdropping equipment could constitute an ideal starting point for the re-programming of the place into an architectural symbol of free communication.
Gest lecture: Frank Rieger _Chaos Computer Club
Guest critic: Katharina Beckmann _TU Berlin
Directed by: Philipp Reinfeld with Prof. Matthias Karch