Philip Buckingham

Form Follows Signal interrogates the geopolitics of orbital sovereignty and proposes an architecture that exists from Geostationary orbit to the territory formed by wifi signal on the ground, in Tshwane South Africa.

Three modes of wifi deployment – geostationary satellite, medium earth orbit satellites and drones – are positioned within an organising system of radiowaves that has been composed by Facebook to give all Township residents free internet access, in Facebook’s ‘Project Isizwe’.

However, this access to the internet is on one condition. That you are not in debt. If your ratepayer account is in arrears you have no internet access.

This radiowave landscape of debt collides with another landscape of debt in Tshwane – that of land debt  formed during the Apartheid years where non-white communities were forcibly removed from valuable, fertile land in the centre of Pretoria to invaluable, infertile land in eight townships. These townships nowadays constitute an important but highly deprived labour force for the car manufacturing industry.

The design proposal of the Ga-Rankuwa Township Mega-Club hacks Facebook's WiFi and its redistribution, breaking the bond of wifi and debt, brings together the different townships and reframes their existing labour relations within the dominative automotive industry.

The Afrofuturist graphic Novel 'Mzansi in Space' transverses the project as a reimagined past and future. Mujava, a Mzansi House DJ, rediscovers her forgotten pre-Apartheid ancestry and this reignition of lost traditions politicises her music which in turn mobilises the youth against the increased violence of the WiFi Enforcement Officers. Mujava moves to form a Mzansi House SuperGroup to rearrange orbital sovereignty based upon ancient African cosmology and propel the Township residents (and the sub-saharan black diaspora as a whole) to the fore of global telecommunications.