The subject of my Thesis is the speculative design of four points in a 2065 AD version of the city of Patras. The design process stems from the story of “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll (1865). The four points define the chapters of a new narrative.
In my version of the story the main character is X-ALICE_42. She is not entirely human. She is a cyborg: an augmented human who carries equipment which connects her permanently to the Cloud augmenting her physical environment. X-ALICE visits four points of the city: The Fiber Hole, the Data Memorial, the Disconnected Field and the Relay Observatory. These
points are essential urban infrastructures that meet the needs of citizens in future Patras. Each point refers to a different part of Carroll’s original story.
The Fiber Hole is the first chapter of my narrative. Similar to Alice’s fall into the Rabbit Hole, X-ALICE, while walking through an arcade of Patras, falls into a manhole. She lands in the underground piping network of the city. The increasing needs for information transmission have resulted in large fiber optic tunnels. X-ALICE wanders through the tunnels of the Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and the Wide Area Network (WAN) until she finds the next manhole leading back to the surface of the city.