THE DATA FERRY

THE DATA FERRY
Name	THE DATA FERRY
Location	The Ferry
Date	2026/07/18
Time	11:00-13:30
PeopleOrganisations	Sara Fumaça
Type	HDSC2026
Web	Yes
Print	No

This event was only for participants of the Summer Camp 2026 and not open to the public. For public events you could check: HDSC2026 Clouds to Commons Public Program

the data ferry: tidal network conditions

The year is 2026. Tectonic plates begin accelerating beyond geological predictions, slowly puzzling the continents back together into a new supercontinent. As the Earth's crust rearranges itself, submarine communication cables resting on the ocean floor drift and stretch to their limits until they finally snap. Across the seabed, a wilderness of fiber-optic cables dance loose, unplugged, swaying with the currents like kelp forests. The internet, long imagined by some as a seamless global web, fragments into countless local networks.

What had once been called the cloud leaves the sky to become tidal.

Signals begin circulating through an ecology of self-built floating infrastructures: ferries, river barges, floating libraries, peer-to-peer rafts and other diy-exquisite-corpse-like vessels. Together they form a delay–tolerant–network in which books, games, software, juicy gossip, archive reports and local caches are stored, carried and relayed from node to node along neighboring waterways.

Traveling back and forth across the IJ river by ferry, we temporarily became part of one of these floating networks.

Through a series of (speculative)score-based exercises, we imagined together how to nourish information in a ferry network where signals flow with the tide, treating networking as a practice of the commons.

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Duration: 2.5 hours

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Access note

• Everyone was welcome to join regardless of age
• No prior knowledge was required
• Workshop was lead in English, but could be side-explained it a bit in Portuguese or Spanish if needed
• We spent a good portion of the workshop on board with people who use the ferry to commute, you were asked to keep in mind that some crossings may be busier than others.
• Amsterdam’s public ferries ( GVB ) are free of charge and accessible.
• You were invited to bring a bottle of water, a small snack and if needed, a cap and sunscreen. The ferry also has a covered area in case you would prefer to stay out of the sun.

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Bio

Sara Fumaça is an artist and researcher based between Portugal and the Netherlands. Their practice moves across play, role-playing, fiction, and speculative formats as tools for examining and reimagining the social, technological, and ecological networks we inhabit, shape and archive.

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