%0 Journal Article
%A Corsín Jiménez, Alberto
%A Estalella Fernández, José Adolfo
%T Ethnography: a prototype
%D 2017
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/100608
%X The article describes a long-term collaboration with a variety of free culture activists inMadrid: digital artists, software developers and guerrilla architectural collectives.Coming of age as Spain walked into the abyss of the economic crisis, we describe howwe re-functioned our ethnographic project into a ‘prototype’. We borrow the notion ofprototype from free culture activism: a socio-technical design characterised by theopenness of its underlying technical and structural sources, including for exampleaccess to its code, its technical and design specifications, and documentary and archivalregistries. These ethnographic prototypes functioned as boundary objects and zones ofinfrastructural enablement that allowed us to argue with our collaborators about the cityat the same time as we argued through the city. Providing a symmetrical counterpoint tothe actions of free culture hackers elsewhere in the city, our anthropological prototypeswere both a cultural signature of the radical praxis taking place in Madrid today and itsexpressive infrastructure.
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