Operations Room in Hangar, with The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI)

In July, Hangar welcomes an Operations Room, a method for investigating how computational infrastructures affect institutional operations, proposed by The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI). An Operations Room uses a mix of practices such as code inspection, decolonial critical discourse analysis, dependency mapping, creative experimentation and interface analysis not only to interrogate scenes of digital transformation, but also to experiment with ways in which computational infrastructures might operate differently.

In this case, we will start from a collective study of the online accounting platform that Hangar has recently implemented. It is one of many EU-funded projects designed to encourage the general digitisation of government and to accompany the introduction of mandatory e-invoicing. The platformisation of administration seems like a banal solution for increased efficiency, but it will draw schools, cultural organisations, hospitals and collectives deeper into the extractive folds of the cloud. During this week of collective study, the Hangar team will work with TITiPI to analyse how the adoption of online accounting creates new dependencies, shifts institutional expertise, potentially introduces boundary regimes into daily operations, and generally transforms the ability of organisations to take responsibility for being accountable on their own terms.

This Operations Room is a collaboration between TITiPI, Hangar and La Virreina in the context of the InfraMaintenance line of work, and is brought together as a central part of the LaaS (Life as a Service) Fellowship by Jara Rocha, who is also an associate member of TITiPI.

Participation in this session is by invitation, but extensive documentation and a public report will be made available afterwards.

Image: Edith Clarke, 1921, patent for accounting for electrical quantities in transmission lines.