{"id":5440,"date":"2016-08-13T14:26:42","date_gmt":"2016-08-13T14:26:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/?page_id=5440"},"modified":"2016-09-20T17:47:35","modified_gmt":"2016-09-20T17:47:35","slug":"going-off-the-cloud","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-9-alternative-internets\/peer-reviewed-papers\/going-off-the-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Going off-the-cloud: The role of art in the development of a user-owned & controlled connected world"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daphne Dragona and Dimitris Charitos<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Introduction <\/span><\/h2>\n

In the Post-Digital period, there is no room left for promises or illusions. As Cramer (2014) has suggested, after the Snowden disclosures users are more and more faced with a contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets. The other side of today\u2019s datafied world is the one shadowed by what we don’t know about the networks and the platforms we are using. While our lives are becoming more and more transparent, network infrastructures are becoming invisible and little do we know about how processes and architectures work (Dragona, 2014). The networked world is a world of opacity and this is gradually becoming one of the fundamental asymmetries in the manner that users relate to the networks. Artist Julian Oliver (2014) suggests that \u201cwithout edges we cannot know where we are, nor through whom we speak,\u201d while artist Danja Vasiliev (2014) also remarks that \u201cwe hardly know what our device does behind our back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reaching the point where \u201cthe internet does not exist\u201d (Aranda et al., 2014), where all we know is the presence of the Cloud, new facts need to be taken into consideration. When technology is becoming invisible, we as users at the same time are losing our rights on it. Olia Lialina (2012) claims that we can no longer protect or delete our files, we cannot get them back, nor can we see technology itself. The emergence of the Invisible User is, according to her, more important than the one of the Invisible Computer. Similarly, Bratton argues that the \u201cstack\u201d has \u201cstaged the death of the user\u201d allowing other non-human Users, like the sensors and the algorithms, to become actors (Bratton, 2014). This phenomenon can also be understood as the blackboxing of society and culture (Pasquale, 2015) that does not allow us to have an understanding of the network infrastructures we depend upon. The sciences of behaviourism, game theory and cybernetics have assisted in the formation of a system that is recording it and predicting it all, carefully exposing only its \u201cinputs\u201d and \u201coutputs\u201d (Galloway, 2010). As Latour (1999) has written, \u201cthe more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.\u201d Today the contemporary infrastructure space has become \u201cthe secret weapon of the most powerful people in the world precisely because it orchestrates activities that can remain unstated but are nonetheless consequential\u201d (Easterling, 2014). So what could be done under these circumstances?<\/p>\n

Networks should be made visible, computerised systems should become transparent, and technologies should be made responsive and available, Sassen writes (2011). The \u201cright to infrastructure\u201d can be reclaimed by re-appropriating networks and infrastructures (Corsin Himenez, 2012). But for this to happen, a new form of ownership (de Lange and de Wall, 2012) supported by a new form of literacy (Parks, 2010), directly related to infrastructures, seems to be needed. This suggestion is in accordance with what Greenfield (2009) has also framed as a need for translators, for \u201cpeople capable of opening these occult systems, demystifying them and explaining their implications\u201d to the others.<\/p>\n

During the last 15 years, while everyday life is being increasingly datafied, an emerging scene of network practitioners from different fields has been actively involved in building alternative networks of communication and file-sharing. Building their own infrastructures by using open hardware and software, they have been developing and communicating models that can be considered as current \u201ccounter-infrastructures\u201d (Dragona, 2014) that aim to provoke change of a bottom-up structure. Community networks, ad hoc offline networks and local WiFi access points are examples of such infrastructures that users themselves can own, manage and control. They formulate what can be described as DIY networking, which comes as a response to the opacity of today\u2019s centralised network platforms and the issues of surveillance and commodification that they entail. Among the practitioners of this DIY networking scene, a growing number of artists have been playing a crucial role from the very beginning, offering alternatives and critical perspectives. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss certain exemplary initiatives within the time-period they emerged in.<\/p>\n

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From organizational aesthetics to the network commons <\/span><\/h2>\n

\u201cDon’t hate the machine. Be the machine,\u201d Pasquinelli wrote back in 2004, addressing a call for \u201cradical machines\u201d that would function \u201cas places of autonomy and autopoiesis\u201d that would allow the sharing of knowledge, tools and spaces. Just when Web 2.0 was about to emerge, such responses as \u201cradical machines\u201d could already be seen coming from the field of art. Becoming the machine, becoming an apparatus or a network could be translated as designing a set of relationships, deciding the topology and the protocols that will define the organisation between links and nodes and the exchange among them (Dragona, 2015).<\/p>\n

This idea of becoming the machine or even the system and the node can be traced already back in previous decades of art history; Systems Art, Mail Art and the Fluxus offer such examples from the 60s and 70s. Haacke wrote in 1969 (Haacke, in Graham and Cook, 2010: 52-53): \u201cThe working premise is to think in terms of systems; the production of systems, the interferences with and exposure of existing systems. Such an approach is concerned with the operational structure of organisations, in which transfer of information, energy and\/or material occurs.\u201d This stance is apparent in the work of artists like Haacke himself who were interested in the exposure of the organisation and functioning of art institutions but it can also be identified in the performative projects of feminist artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles who aimed to make visible the invisible human infrastructures of care and maintenance in a city context. Process was primary for such works, which were commenting on the influence of cybernetics, on the systematisation of society and lived experience (ibid.). These aspects were also tackled by the Fluxus who followed a different, rather playful, yet radical and open approach of seeking new ways of understanding with their logging activities, their fluxkits and scores. In addition, Mail Art was an early community network born and expanded as a virus by artists who used the postal system to exchange small-scale works or to send instructions for the creation of DIY products (Bazzichelli, 2013: 73). Despite their differences, all the above artistic interventions and projects focused on experimenting with and opening up channels of communication for free exchange.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo analyse networking dynamics requires reflection and consciousness in the use of technology and media,\u201d Bazzichelli argues (ibid., 77) and this is a process that artists building systems and networks today greatly need to engage in. Goriunova (2012: 3), in her book about art platforms, similarly remarks that, \u201cThe art platform is a conceptual device that allows for a differentiation and problematisation of networks […] It is not only a way of looking, but also a dynamic of assembling and coming up with such a body.\u201d In order to underline and express this dynamic of assembling that can be found in art, Goriunova uses the term \u201corganisational aesthetics\u201d that is more than a way of looking. \u201cOrganisational aesthetics is a process of emergence and a mode of enquiry that gives us a way to understand a digital object, process, or body\u201d (ibid., 7). Adopting this term, Fuller (2010: 4-9) also notes that the aesthetic undertaking can be found \u201cin the development, movement and transformation of a loosely, precipitously or precisely assembled system of people, technologies, words, signals, the sense of those cohering, evaporating and reshaping over time,\u201d as well as, \u201cin the ethical dimensions of relations between processes, forms of access, cultures and their carriers, whether they are people, languages or technologies.\u201d On a similar direction, we can also recall Lovink\u2019s (2008: 226-227) codeword about \u201cdistributed aesthetics\u201d that is in accordance with an approach that \u201cno longer highlights technology as something revolutionary or disruptive,\u201d and that manages \u201cto point to the social formations\u201d that the technologies of connectivity provoke.<\/p>\n

Taking these last points into consideration, that is the assembling not only among people, but also among languages and technologies and the attention paid to issues of access, openness and inclusion when such networks are developed, this paper presents and discusses a series of appropriately selected alternative DIY networks, platforms and initiatives that are being proposed by artists as a response to today\u2019s datafied and controlled connected world. At the same time the paper examines these organisational dynamics as decisive factors towards the formation of what Armin Medosch (2014a) framed as \u201cNetwork Commons\u201d. These new infrastructures may involve both social and technological topologies and may be based on the fundamental cultural commons, such as the languages, the affects and the codes. Additionally, if we follow the thought of Hardt and Negri (2012: 64), it can be suggested that these infrastructures are significant, in that they are \u201cconstructed, possessed, managed and distributed by all.\u201d To return to Pasquinelli\u2019s older call, becoming the machine nowadays, can be understood as commoning the machine and therefore assigning to it new properties and values.<\/p>\n

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DIY networking & Art <\/span><\/h2>\n

The fundamental idea behind DIY networking is that it offers its users the possibility of ownership of the infrastructure, as well as of all generated digital information (Antoniadis and Apostol, 2014). Being based on affordable infrastructure, open source software and hardware and topologies that are distributed or decentralised, this approach opposes today\u2019s dominant centralised control paradigm, formulating \u201can interesting alternative for an autonomous option for communication\u201d (Antoniadis et al., 2014) and file-sharing. Local Wi-Fi networks and user-controlled distributed systems of connectivity not only offer new opportunities for a combination of virtual and physical encounters, but also allow for anonymity and protect privacy creating feelings of ownership and independence (ibid.). For this reason, DIY networking of different scopes and scales can be regarded as a substantial alternative to today\u2019s centralised on-line communication, for escaping the fears of surveillance and commodification. Following a rich culture of DIY practices that starts already in the 60s (Ratto and Boler, 2014: 9), DIY networking offers systems and models based on low-budget bottom-up solutions.<\/p>\n

As earlier suggested, the aim of this paper is to discuss the role of art in the field of DIY networking. For this reason, a particular categorisation of DIY networking artistic interventions is proposed and certain significant examples of such interventions are presented and situated within the categorisation. Taking into consideration their different services and aims, as well as the different periods that they emerged in, the paper focuses on Community Networks, Tactical Mesh Networks, Off-the-cloud Toolkits and Speculative Networks, arguing that these are the main fields where artistic initiatives can be located. While highlighting the role of artists for each section separately, at the end the paper draws a set of common conclusions in order to define the features and aims of these initiatives.<\/p>\n

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Community networks <\/span><\/h2>\n

\u201cThe sleeping beauty of mesh has been kissed into life by the community.\u201d (Elektra, Medosch, 2015)<\/em><\/p>\n

The need to connect offline is not new. Although mesh networking has become especially known in the last few years, as a response to issues connected to state surveillance, data profiling and Internet blackouts, its first peak is located in the first half of the previous decade. This is when the well-known mesh networks, such as the Spanish Guifi, the German Freifunk, the Austrian Funkfeuer and the Athenian AWMN, were built, establishing their first urban mesh nodes and links. While, at first, their popularity grew thanks to the greater speed that these connections offered, which was important for both communication and file-sharing, it soon became clear that the potentiality and the outreach of these networks could go far beyond that.<\/p>\n

In his analysis about why it is important to build free wireless networks, written in 2006, Lenczner lists the following points (2006: 228-229):<\/p>\n