Ethnography: a prototype
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2017
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Taylor & Francis
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Abstract
The article describes a long-term collaboration with a variety of free culture activists in
Madrid: digital artists, software developers and guerrilla architectural collectives.
Coming of age as Spain walked into the abyss of the economic crisis, we describe how
we re-functioned our ethnographic project into a ‘prototype’. We borrow the notion of
prototype from free culture activism: a socio-technical design characterised by the
openness of its underlying technical and structural sources, including for example
access to its code, its technical and design specifications, and documentary and archival
registries. These ethnographic prototypes functioned as boundary objects and zones of
infrastructural enablement that allowed us to argue with our collaborators about the city
at the same time as we argued through the city. Providing a symmetrical counterpoint to
the actions of free culture hackers elsewhere in the city, our anthropological prototypes
were both a cultural signature of the radical praxis taking place in Madrid today and its
expressive infrastructure.