Toward building a self-initiative, portable and responsive social network, PORTA2030 undertakes performative relay-urgency network exercises.

Towards building a portable, sustainable and responsive social network by year 2030, PORTA2030 will perform a mobile network project: PORTA2030. PORTA2030 deploys the porta-pack, a data sensing-storage-transmission portable unit that allows intervention via its urgent signal relay network system. PORTA2030 takes into account any given urgency scenario and mobilizes porters to propagate and activate a collective response through visual and sonic manifestation.

PORTA2030 recruits a group of 10 porters made up of community residents – workers and artists, butchers and barbers, hooded youth and pensioners, soundists and visualizers, bikers and talkers. We start by engaging a community and by collaborating with a local hub. The scripting sessions are held to survey, research, configure and assess collective social conditions. As the porters collect AV data, transmitted live and sensing urgent signals, the communal data as performance spectacle is on public display.

PORTA2030 will launch a prototype dispatch at Broadway Market where three public gatherings will be held. These open sessions will discuss self-initiative networks, initiate open calls for porters and conduct scripting sessions and technical workshops with porta-packs. A week long performative exercise is planned for April, 2006.