Without known limits, the soft-space is the tangible manifestation of a desire for transparency born from the advent of decentralization. Modernist ambitions to mechanize the environment have been replaced by a desire for collective intelligibility. Sharing and collaboration have become the new standard of a decentralized economy. The information, its truthfulness and its universal accessibility, foster the resurgence of a regained polis, where all of its constitutive data is made public. Based on an open protocol for decentralization of geospatial data markets, the soft-space monetizes all travels.

 

The “economy of transparency” brings to light a double spatial dialectic: on the one hand, the desire for transparency at the expense of legibility, and on the other the loss of readability as a necessary factor of profitability. The economy thus makes use of the services of an architecture that has become elusive. Abandoning all attempts to aestheticize politics, it preferred to become the impossible representation of a society with abstract mechanisms. Smooth, transparent, turning the interior into an exterior and vice versa, the architecture deploys an infinity of planes, the superposition of which prevents distinction, while navigation becomes dependent on a system interface.

 

Paradoxically, this confusion supports a system where positioning and geolocation constitute the primary factors of soft-production. Indeed, the protocol mobilizes triangulation and location validation by the surrounding community - spatial constraint has become localization, and geolocation, a productive force. With the constant need to update their own location, each individual then becomes the consumer as much as the producer of a commodified geolocation, in which the individual’s confused perception of space serves collective objectivity.

Proof of Location, FOAM (US), 2017