OS: Belgrade
A cultural investigation hosted on developer infrastructure. Treating displacement as debugging and integration as installation - where the city operates as an operating system and poetry is code.
This approach makes displacement functional rather than mystifying. Instead of feeling lost or inauthentic, you recognise you're simply debugging - identifying where your existing code doesn't work and writing new functions. Language barriers become encoding problems. Transit confusion becomes API documentation you haven't read yet. Cultural misunderstandings become version conflicts. The operating system metaphor doesn't make city life less human - it makes the process of adaptation legible. You can track your integration like you'd track software installation: identifying dependencies, handling exceptions, building out your system libraries one routine at a time.
Code is poetry when it works. Poetry is code when it executes. The operating system framework reveals that cities don't just host life - they run it. Every resident is executing their own processes within the city's architecture. Some processes are efficient, some are buggy, some conflict with other users' code. OS:Belgrade documents what it means to install yourself as a new process in an already-running system. Not as tourist (read-only access) or as native resident (compiled into the system at birth) - but as someone consciously writing themselves into a city that's been running for centuries. The operating system never stops. You just learn to read the processes.
This documentation approach captures things traditional urban observation misses. Instead of romanticising street life or critiquing urban planning, you're logging how the system actually runs. What processes execute automatically? Which ones require manual intervention? Where does the city handle errors gracefully, and where does it crash? The infrastructure doesn't lie. It shows you exactly how the city operates - not how it presents itself, not how it wants to be understood, but how it actually functions when you're trying to run your daily processes within it.
