“Look out the window. Not toward the Bund—check out Yan’an Road.” Miranda swiveled her head around to look out the big window [...] Yan’an Road, like all of the major thoroughfares in Shanghai, was filled, from the shop windows on one side to the shop windows on the other, with people on bicycles and powerskates. [...] “What am I looking for?” “Notice how no one’s empty-handed? They’re all carrying something.”

Carl was right. At a minimum, everyone had a small plastic bag with something in it. Many people, such as the bicyclists, carried heavier loads. “Now just hold that image in your head for a moment, and think about how to set up a global telecommunications network.” [...]

“But a better analogy is that the objects are people like us, sitting in various buildings that front on the street. Suppose that we want to send a message to someone over in Pudong. We write the message down on a piece of paper, and we go to the door and hand it to the first person who goes by and say, ‘Take this to Mr. Gu in Pudong.’ And he skates down the street for a while and runs into someone on a bicycle who looks like he might be headed for Pudong, and says, ‘Take this to Mr. Gu.’ A minute later, that person gets stuck in traffic and hands it off to a pedestrian who can negotiate the snarl a little better, and so on and so on, until eventually it reaches Mr. Gu. When Mr. Gu wants to respond, he sends us a message in the same way.”

A scene from The Diamond Age describing packet switching and network technologies with traffic in an urban environment.

Pondering about the formal aspects of the sculpture. These are sketches to create an bigger whole where each element can be added at any time.

In general there are two directions the project could go to.
Option A:
- Have a beautifully designed sculpture
- Cut it in pieces of equal size.
- Create a nice sticker with the instructions to bring the piece to the exhibit.
- “I am a packet lost along the way. deliver me in any possible way.”
> Sculpture itself has to look absolutely beautiful and amazing. Has to show the completeness.
> Pieces are NOT containers

This approach would have more stress on the sculpture being designed in a great way, and the relationality would be more defined by the way of its delivery, and the people coming together to deliver it at the opening. This would not be much more than a nice invite for the exhibition, but also inviting random strangers that would otherwise not see the show.
The image below shows how this could look like.

Option B:
- Create a sculpture that consists of single pieces, that are themselves containers.
- These have to look great, and the bigger whole has to look amazing as well
- People are asked to fill the container with ’something’ and to deliver it (maybe also by mail)
- To generate peer pressure the empty slots in the sculpture could display the container name
> Additional website to support it?

This approach still has MANY open questions. Gathering data from the community would be very interesting and maybe more challenging. On the other hand, expecting people to create something special, three dimensional, AND delivering it is probably wishful thinking…
Interesting in that respect, the project Cultural Probes by Bill Gaver, Anthony Dunne and Elena Pacenti.

Reviewing network protocols and packet switching. So far it is not defined how big of a role these technologies should play in the relational architecture, but for sure interesting to look at when thinking about the physical containers traveling through public/physical space.

Connectionless protocols (I.e. IP)
- data corruption
- lost data packets
- duplicate arrival
- out-of-order packet delivery

Connection-oriented protocols (I.e. TCP)
- data arrives in order
- data has minimal error
- duplicate data is discarded
- lost/discarded packets are resent

Generation Praktikum – A great and similar project by New York design firm 2×4

A possibility to use an existing web-based network to create the Relational Sculpture….

All concepts have been merged into one, An physical social sculpture. Read the pdf

Some of the comments:
Yvonne: The space is a space of transition/traffic, not a plaza.
Jason: Dorms across the street have a history of projections.
Nitin: Maybe the projection intervention should happen somewhere else? Maybe in front of ML is the “safe” way to do it?
References: Erving Goffman and William Whyte

Some sketched out ideas what you could do with the container network. Here are the project ideas:
Mapping specific information to the journey of an actual container.
This could be a slowly traveling message, that can be sent from location A to B. The message cannot be read until it reaches its destination, but its journey can be monitored.
You could also map localized news to it—your personalized (google) news page travels along with a container and you receive news from that specific location (USA>South America>Europe>North Africa>Middle East)
A data container
Equip the container with the possibility to store data. The data could change on the way.
> Make a safety backup of the whole internet?
> Noah’s container, everybody on the world can put data onto it
Zero Supply Chain Container
Have a complete construction facility inside a container. I.e. rapid prototyping machines that create the to be delivered commodity on the way to the delivery destination…

Simulate internet packet switching?