Across an increasing number of countries, the space to express dissent is closing. Protest is met with prosecution, online speech with jail time, and the infrastructure to identify, track and process people appears overnight. People are going to jail for reposts on social media, independent channels are being closed and protest organisers are facing serious lawsuits. A lot of people are scared to go to the protests because of the terrible consequences.
COORDINATED° proposes a framework of a moving, decentralised protest, communicating the locations with autonomous flying agents in an encoded way. Pretending to be just an entertaining performance, drones are transmitting a hidden message: coordinates of the next location, that could be read with the help of AR.
Since a lot of infrastructures to capture people by police are being prepared overnight, the moving protest could lower the chance of being arrested. The use of drones will make it harder to create lawsuits against organisers, and the decoding mechanism based on AR increases the time for police to understand the next location and move their infrastructure in a top-down way, which is always slower than bottom-up self-organisation of the protestors.
The artwork is trying to shift the way we perceive technology. While a lot of machines are being used for war, oppression, and surveillance, could other machines help to organise the resistance? It is time to engage in a critical conversation about the distributed networks connecting humans and non-humans symbiotically, to stand for freedom and against aggression, in a bottom-up way.
