Laura Forlano

OFFICIAL alias ONLINE NAME: Laura Forlano alias laura4lano

CYBORG? Repacking my bags as soon as I get home from a trip; Owning SIM cards from 5 countries; Dreaming in Japanese

; Moving fast enough to appear to actually be everywhere at once;

LINK UP: skype ID: laura4lano mailto: lef45 AT columbia DOT edu

MOBILITY RECORD: As a child, mobility through food. As a student, mobility through living abroad Inherit the Wind dvdrip in Tokyo, Japan. As an adult, mobility through love

ACTIVITIES: Researcher, Writer, Teacher, Connecter

ADDICTIONS: Netflix and Movies On Demand; Latin rock and MTV en español; Chicken soup of all shapes, sizes and nationalities i.e. Pho Ga, Sopa de Lima, Veselka’s:

KIT: iPhone, 4-year old PowerBook, Nokia pale-blue candybar phone with fold out keyboard, Multiple Adapters and Skype Headset; Layover bag with essentials (I learned this after sleeping in Miami International Airport (MIA) once amidst freezing air conditioning and, a second time, getting stranded at a hotel near MIA in the middle of the night that didn’t have any guest toothbrushes); TimeOut Guide (because I am a compulsive book-buyer) and fold-out analog maps to every city (because international data downloading on the iPhone is too expensive).

interfaithchapel prayersignage

WHILE TRANSITING… I LOVE taking pictures of airport prayer rooms for my latest collaborative project, a book proposal with a photographer-friend. Airport prayer rooms are fascinating sites of meaningful connection in the transient mobile spaces of airports. After reading the diary entries written into the guest book at the airport prayer room in Frankfurt, I began to think of airports as communities of travelers where people could connect and reconnect with themselves and others rather as purely commercial sites of commerce.

I HATE Miami International Airport (with the exception of the bison burgers) because I’ve had far too many unplanned layovers there due to missed connecting flights. It is one of the most poorly planned airports that I’ve ever been to and the American Airlines staff seem equally confused about which line to stand in to get tickets since there seem to be multiple lines for Domestic and International. Also, I nearly got killed there after an elderly lady mounted an escalator with a luggage cart but couldn’t push it off, which led to a near pile up of people and bags at the bottom.

CURRENT RESEARCH: Writing a book proposal based on my dissertation “When Code Meets Place: Collaboration and Innovation at WiFi Hotspots”. The dissertation examines the forms of organizing that occur when code – digital information, networks and interfaces – meets place. In order to describe emerging socio-technical arrangements, this dissertation analyzes the people and organizations for whom WiFi networks, and the spaces that they inhibit, play an important role. These include, for example, freelancers coworking from a Starbucks Coffee in New York, hacktivists innovating open source wireless protocols in a basement in Berlin and social entrepreneurs building bottom-up mesh networks in San Francisco. Drawing on theories from communications and science and technology studies, this dissertation applies network ethnography to analyze themes of social construction, sociality and locality. The dissertation argues that mobile and wireless technologies enable an ad-hoc, community or peer-to-peer form of organizing that is deeply embedded in physical location in contrast to current notions of virtual organizations. The concept of codescapes — the integration of digital networks with physical space — is developed to capture the emerging modes of communication, collaboration and innovation that are occurring at the intersection of technology and place. This conceptual reframing of forms of organizing is essential in order to understand the ways in which organizations, architecture, policies and technologies themselves are being reshaped.

DOCUMENTING “Breakout! Escape from the Office” (and Situated Technologies

), a collaborative project funded by The Architectural League of New York. “Breakout! is a festival of mobile work, where we will be taking meetups, co-working and unconferences to the streets to pioneer new styles of collaborative work in connected public spaces. Over a two week period, BREAKOUT! will return creative work to the streets of New York. Using co-working as a model, and injecting lightweight versions of essential office infrastructure into urban public spaces, BREAKOUT! will explore new and productive niches for working outside of traditional office buildings.”

RESEARCH ENGAGEMENT WITH MOBILITY IS Social/Cultural ***** Business *** Technical ***

CURRENTLY MOBILE? Physically *** Mentally ***** Digitally *****

MOBILE MEANS having an open mind, living a few years into the future, having breakfast with friends in Berlin, getting calls at 2am when traveling because no one can keep track of you, knowing what it’s like to be completely off-the-grid, and never feeling too comfortable in your own skin.

Mobile means feeling ‘at home’, making space meaningful while, at the same time, flexible, and, more often than not, sitting around working in my pajamas at home whether in Tokyo, Berlin or New York.

The NID stands for Neo-nomad ID. The concept wants to push the envelop of a classical interview by providing readers clues to reflect on mobilities, and the paradoxes engendered. These NIDs are “tranches de vies,” meaning “slices of lives,” rather than a questionnaire listing projects. They dwell into the intimate and the everyday life of beings to understand better our relationship to mobilities and technologies. Necessarily, because the method of investigation relates more to ethnography than journalism, I felt that visuals were essential to the NID. Also, NID in French means “nest.”

The NID 003 follows the NID 002 with Nicolas Nova and the NID 001 with Cati Vaucelle.

If you liked this post, check these: