By Jacobo Nájera
Translated by Sofia LeBlanc
One of the first times I remember having to ask permission to come home after curfew was during my teenage years when I started working at a sonidero*. There, I learned about the conspiracy of knowledge between audio, electricity, illumination, choreography, music, restoration, invention and teamwork that debuted on stage and in the poetry of movement, on the dance floor.
It was fascinating to discover, at the time, that the universe of sound had its own language that could be manipulated through the loudspeakers in mid, high and low ranges, with depth and dimensionality. But above all I found myself in this new passion for communication. I uncovered a strange relationship with technology and the devices that amplify, transmit, record, play, and project both sound and still and moving images.
Often, our limited material resources prevented us from accessing equipment made by known brands. Instead we were driven to think and imagine how we would create our own equipment, how we would assemble, reconstruct, repair and refurbish it using the skills and knowledge produced by necessity. I say this because I believe deeply that even when we use imported technologies, we are still inventing and experimenting, which results in the acquisition of other kinds of knowledge and connections amidst absence.
On this 15th anniversary of the Red de Periodistas de a Pie (Network of Journalists in the Street), I’d like to share my vision of digital architecture and the role it could play in communication. This comes from my experience in the media outlet Pie de Página, which is part of the Network’s Media Alliance.
In terms of their physical materiality, Pie de Página’s websites live in America, Asia, Europe and Oceania, where the computers that allow it to function are located. This includes our backups and recovery systems in case of emergencies. Our infrastructure has reached an audience of 7 million people, in addition to bots, and has stood up to routine large-scale, complex attacks.
Pie de Página’s IT team has been in conversation with editorial, technical and design perspectives, alongside a network of Latin American thinkers seeking solutions and alternatives to reconcile our technological needs. This means reclaiming what we’ve learned both locally and through our participation in global conversations about the future of these formats and devices that we depend on daily to function in the digital world.
We’ve been lucky to speak with the Tierra Común cooperative, Técnicas Rudas, Radius, FipaSoft, Primero de Mayo, eQualitie and Ocurre. Thanks to these groups, we’ve learned from past errors—and about how fragile our infrastructures can be when exposed. But, as Christopher Alexander explains, “…the idea of repair is creative, dynamic, open. It assumes that we are constantly led to the creation of new wholes, by paying attention to the defects in the existing wholes, and trying to repair them. It is still true that every act helps to repair some larger, older whole: but the repair not only patches it–it also modifies it, transforms it, puts it on a journey to become something entirely new.”
In this process of repair, our infrastructure is made up of computer languages, relationships and agreements that together make up what we’ve collectively called digital architecture. In the Red de Periodistas de a Pie panel discussion in honor of the network’s 15 year anniversary, journalist and writer Daniela Pastrana spoke about this as a crucial part of the task of communication in today’s world.
Personally, I began to think more seriously about the architecture of software technologies as part of technological thought after meeting the programmer and carpenter Federico Mena. I was compelled by the conclusions he drew in his famous text, “The Systems we Inherit like Old Cities (“Los sistemas heredados como ciudades viejas”):
“But what would happen if we, as software developers, were to leave a positive legacy rather than a negative one? What would happen if we wrote software that could be maintained, broken into parts that could then be joined with other systems, even by other people, so that our work is not lost if we decide–or are obligated–to stop maintaining that software?”
Federico Mena
At Pie de Página we’ve learned that digital architecture is a form of thinking about our practice. It’s a dialectic between, on one side, the needs that we strive to meet with the technologies we construct, invent and implement, and on the other, the values, beliefs and worldviews that make them function in a larger infrastructure.
It’s about the possibility of developing an artisanal trade and way of thinking that doesn’t quite revolve around universal solutions. Although the goal is to develop sufficient solutions, it’s impossible not to run into conflicts and contradictions, particularly in specific contexts. This means working intentionally to create strategies that coincide with a given social context’s material–and conceptual–resources. This implies a constant dialogue between the possibilities of the medium, the intentions of the creators, editors and reporters and the commitments and material possibilities. It’s also important to leverage the potential of engineers, designers and poets to work together as part of a shared universe.
The musicians that we worked with in the sonidero would say that when we create, we turn to the past. In the words of Victoria Bajar, the first female programmer to get a degree in computer science in Argentina:
“I invite today’s young people to learn something about the way we did things and how. Because those are the foundations, the origins. Don’t look just at the little computers and strange toys that are out there; also think about why they’re made. I’m not saying that the new generation should do things as we did. Just don’t lose sight of the bits themselves, or else they’ll turn into a kind of dark magic and that’s something that we tech people don’t want to happen ever.”
Victoria Bajar
It’s no surprise that in the search for autonomy, various methods of computing have been bogged down by colonialism, the world’s crisis of civilization and collective tragedies. That’s why I want to invite tech workers and craftspeople of computation to continue thinking about digital architectures as bridges for means of communication. But above all, the poetics of digital architecture make media outlets possible, in a context in which freedom of press is threatened and many reporters risk their lives to inform their communities.
The civil engineer Roma Agrawal often says that in Eastern architectural bridge-building traditions, bridge safety does not depend on the user’s perception of its immobility, but rather on the process of construction.
*A sonidero refers to a group of DJs, engineers and entertainers that play recorded music in public, and the associated cultural movement in Mexican popular culture.