Alternative sprawls, junkcities: Buenos Aires Libre and horizontal urban epistemologies

The horizontally organized Buenos Aires Libre is a cadre of new media artists, programmers and technophiles building their own autonomous network, apart from the Internet, in Argentina’s capital city. This network uses line-of-sight connections via directional antennae to link members and users throughout the urban landscape. The following article explores ‘junk’ and ‘sprawl’ as conceptual and material terrain activated by the network and its users. Both sprawl and junk help it to construct alternative epistemologies of urban life and to highlight the centrality of urban space to political, economic and informational systems at work in the contemporary city.