Way Out (2018)

Way Out is the fourth chapter of Turbulent Times. Nothing Happens in nice weather and exposes some of the contradictions connected to the common perception and understanding of technology.
The project reworks a thesis we already discussed in 2016, concerning the management of the boundaries between visibility and invisibility, exposing the double bound between big data, surveillance technologies and the IoT. In the past years, while domotics and robotics colonized our homes with cute and apparently harmless devices, the idea of being disconnected or becoming invisible has been associated with mental diseases such as depression or more explicitly targeted as potential terrorist behaviour.
Our work combines the design principles behind many of the smart devices populating our daily life with a jammer, an illegal technology that can interrupt all signals from GSM and GPS to 5G and Wi-fi, creating a bubble of invisibility inside which individuals can’t be tracked, listened to, watched, and mined by their devices.
Accompanying the sculpture are the codes from Italian legislation regulating the use of jammers, whose approximation highlights the flaws in the bureaucratic understanding of technology.

For Italian readers, a further reading can be found here.

3D model designed with [A+M2] Architects
Laser cut and aluminium anodization: Lo.Sa. srl