“Life’s too short for spreadsheets” is the motto of the software that Hangar uses for its accounting. This software (with its more extensive ecology of practices) functioned as a trigger and object of study for an Operations Room that took place at Hangar over four days last July. An Operations Room is “a situation designed [by TITiPI] to interrogate the impact of a computing infrastructure and its implementation on the operations of an institution, organization or collective”. The objective is to achieve an understanding in different layers of what a technology does or imposes on the behaviours of an institution and those who make it up—in other words, to reach an understanding of the distributed agency of what we call “technology”. During that intense study session, thirteen people addressed the question of the relational logistics that accounting through the cloud imposes on the configuration of contemporary public affairs.
The software that was at the centre of this collective analysis thus serves as an example of the transition that has been taking place in recent years from software as a program installed on computers to software that we access as a service, paying fees and delegating our modes of operation and maintenance to the companies that provide it as a package of services.
Anna Manubens and Jara Rocha intend to hold a conversation not so much about the details and intensity of that meeting but more generally about the many varied links to which the logic of “service” gives rise and the many effects that relations of service and/or servitude have on contemporary individual and institutional behaviours, whose roles fluctuate technopolitically between those who serve and those who are served.
It is therefore an occasion to discuss the transition and the ways in which the community as a space for the manufacture of relational techniques is collapsed by the everything-as-a-service paradigm. The participants will share their reflections on the contemporary relational panorama from within public cultural institutions and will discuss the confirmation of the paradigm shift by extrapolating what happens in software to what happens in life… and vice versa.
