http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=Freja+Kir 2026-04-25T10:23:52Z User contributions MediaWiki 1.45.1 http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2681 2023-06-22T11:04:55Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> = Freja Kir =<br /> <br /> = Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech =<br /> <br /> == Abstract ==<br /> This paper directs attention to the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. It does so by enhancing the understanding of minor tech through the analysis and case study of the artwork, VPN. While minor tech might sound unfamiliar to the many, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar through examples of digital commoning, sharing of skills, and organisational systems. In the case of VPN, the work existed as a growing emancipatory multimedia archive, executed as a transparent server architecture revealing its technical workings to its users. This format exemplified tactics of intentional glitches through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. By identifying the elements of tactics and care within the VPN, the paper draws parallels of overlapping tendencies within the movement of minor tech. Drawing on Olga Gorionova's research on 'Shadow librarians' and including former digital examples of knowledge sharing furthermore assists in sketching a web development towards the nature of minor tech and VPN. By analysing the significance of these initiatives, the paper raises the questions: What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> == Introduction ==<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> == An emancipatory file server ==<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> <br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1: VPN documentation of installment.]]<br /> <br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. <br /> <br /> [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2: VPN Network map.]]<br /> <br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider the intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the different ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an expanding relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN provides a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. The drive of critically exposing infrastructural systems is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. <br /> <br /> Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research inquiry ’the Underground Division’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting as a follow up to 'Possible Bodies’ focus on complex relation of bodies in context of technotools. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> == Chronological tech ==<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures. <br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape, to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior, be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.<br /> <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3: Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Screenshot: March, 2023.]]<br /> <br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> == Minor Tech ==<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving minor tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. However, while minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services, some of which will be returned to later in the paper. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the digitally located Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech is presented as “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> == Tactical tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4: Page from VPN reader.]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN, as well as minor tech, intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici).<br /> <br /> == Glitchy tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5: VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction (Star and Ruhleder), reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects. One example is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. Minor tech, and specifically the VPN if considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the sharing aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper. This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> == Caring tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6: VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader.]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. <br /> <br /> [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7: Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend.]]<br /> <br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative to those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. As counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies such a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> == Conclusion ==<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Situating the VPN and minor tech in parallel with each other allows us to address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> <br /> == Acknowledgements == <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN.<br /> <br /> == Works cited ==<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989.<br /> <br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', The MIT Press, 1999.<br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.<br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086.<br /> <br /> Cochior, Cristina; Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha. &quot;Digital Discomfort.&quot; ''PROSPECTIONS'', Autumn 2022. https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3.<br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012.<br /> <br /> Easterling, Keller. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014.<br /> <br /> ''Entangled Transparency 3.0.'' ZKM, Karlsruhe. Online conference, 2023. https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30.<br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011&lt;http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32&gt;<br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017. https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/.<br /> <br /> Goriunuova, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> Goriunova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> Grossers, Ben. ''Safebook'', 2019. https://bengrosser.com/projects/safebook/. <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', The MIT Press, 2002.<br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell, and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019. http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship.<br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA), vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505.<br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012. http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/.<br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435.<br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa, and Starosielski, Nicole, eds. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', University of Illinois Press, 2015.<br /> <br /> Peters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015.<br /> <br /> Pisuisse, Frederique and Helgason, Saemundur Thor. ''Cosmos Carl''. https://cosmoscarl.com/.<br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553.<br /> <br /> Rocha, Jara, Femke Snelting, and Helen Pritchard. ''Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program'', The Underground Division, London, 2020. http://ddivision.xyz/.<br /> <br /> de Valk, Marloes. ''Damaged Earth Catalogue''. https://damaged.bleu255.com/.<br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90.<br /> <br /> Woodgate, Agustina; Gomez, Miquel Hervas and Krischock, Sascha.''VPN,'' 2019.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2545 2023-06-19T18:42:24Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> = Freja Kir – =<br /> <br /> = Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech =<br /> <br /> == Abstract ==<br /> This paper directs attention to the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. It does so by enhancing the understanding of minor tech through the analysis and case study of the artwork, VPN. While minor tech might sound unfamiliar to the many, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar through examples of digital commoning, sharing of skills, and organisational systems. In the case of VPN, the work existed as a growing emancipatory multimedia archive, executed as a transparent server architecture revealing its technical workings to its users. This format exemplified tactics of intentional glitches through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. By identifying the elements of tactics and care within the VPN, the paper draws parallels of overlapping tendencies within the movement of minor tech. Drawing on Olga Gorionova's research on 'Shadow librarians' and including former digital examples of knowledge sharing furthermore assists in sketching a web development towards the nature of minor tech and VPN. By analysing the significance of these initiatives, the paper raises the questions: What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> == Introduction ==<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> == An emancipatory file server ==<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1: VPN documentation of installment.]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2: VPN Network map.]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider the intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the different ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an expanding relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN provides a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. The drive of critically exposing infrastructural systems is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, ‘Possible Bodies’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> == Chronological tech ==<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures. <br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape, to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior, be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.[[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3: Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Screenshot: March, 2023. ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> == Minor Tech ==<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving minor tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. However, while minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services, some of which will be returned to later in the paper. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the digitally located Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech is presented as “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> == Tactical tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4: Page from VPN reader.]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN, as well as minor tech, intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici).<br /> <br /> == Glitchy tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5: VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction (Star and Ruhleder), reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects. One example is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. Minor tech, and specifically the VPN if considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the sharing aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper. This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> == Caring tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6: VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader.]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7: Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend.]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative to those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. As counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies such a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> == Conclusion ==<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Situating the VPN and minor tech in parallel with each other allows us to address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> <br /> == Acknowledgements == <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN.<br /> <br /> == Works cited ==<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989.<br /> <br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', The MIT Press, 1999.<br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.<br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086.<br /> <br /> Cochior, Cristina; Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha. &quot;Digital Discomfort.&quot; ''PROSPECTIONS'', Autumn 2022. https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3.<br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012.<br /> <br /> Easterling, Keller. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014.<br /> <br /> ''Entangled Transparency 3.0.'' ZKM, Karlsruhe. Online conference, 2023. https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30.<br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011&lt;http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32&gt;<br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017. https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/.<br /> <br /> Goriunuova, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> Goriunova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> Grossers, Ben. ''Safebook'', 2019. https://bengrosser.com/projects/safebook/. <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', The MIT Press, 2002.<br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell, and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019. http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship.<br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA), vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505.<br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012. http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/.<br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435.<br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa, and Starosielski, Nicole, eds. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', University of Illinois Press, 2015.<br /> <br /> Peters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015.<br /> <br /> Pisuisse, Frederique and Helgason, Saemundur Thor. ''Cosmos Carl''. https://cosmoscarl.com/.<br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553.<br /> <br /> Rocha, Jara, Femke Snelting, and Helen Pritchard. ''Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program'', The Underground Division, London, 2020. http://ddivision.xyz/.<br /> <br /> de Valk, Marloes. ''Damaged Earth Catalogue''. https://damaged.bleu255.com/.<br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90.<br /> <br /> Woodgate, Agustina; Gomez, Miquel Hervas and Krischock, Sascha.''VPN,'' 2019.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2511 2023-06-19T13:22:09Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> = Freja Kir – =<br /> <br /> = Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech =<br /> Keywords: artistic media tactics, minor tech, transparent server infrastructure, digital commoning <br /> <br /> == Abstract: ==<br /> This paper directs attention to the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. It does so by enhancing the understanding of minor tech through the analysis and case study of the artwork, VPN. While Minor Tech might sound unfamiliar to the many, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar through examples of digital commoning, sharing of skills, and organisational systems. In the case of VPN, the work existed as a growing emancipatory multimedia archive, executed as a transparent server architecture revealing its technical workings to its users. This format exemplified tactics of intentional glitches through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. By identifying the elements of tactics and care within the VPN, the paper draws parallels of overlapping tendencies within the movement of minor tech. Drawing on Olga Gorionova's research on 'Shadow librarians' and including former digital examples of knowledge sharing furthermore assists in sketching a web development towards the nature of minor tech and VPN. By analysing the significance of these initiatives, the paper raises the questions: What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> == Introducing ==<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> == An emancipatory file server ==<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2, VPN Network map]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider the intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the different ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an expanding relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN provides a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. The drive of critically exposing infrastructural systems is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, ‘Possible Bodies’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> == Chronological tech ==<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures. <br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape, to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior, be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.[[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Screenshot: March, 2023 ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> == Minor Tech ==<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving minor tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. However, while minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services, some of which will be returned to later in the paper. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the digitally located Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech is presented as “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> == Tactical tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4, Page from VPN reader]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN, as well as minor tech, intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici). <br /> <br /> == Glitchy tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction (Star and Ruhleder), reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects. One example is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. Minor tech, and specifically the VPN if considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the sharing aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper. This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> == Caring tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader ]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative to those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. As counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies such a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> == Conclusion ==<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Situating the VPN and minor tech in parallel with each other allows us to address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> == Works cited ==<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989&gt;<br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', MIT Press, 1999<br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018<br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017 &lt;https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086&gt;<br /> <br /> Cochior, Cristina; Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha. &quot;Digital Discomfort.&quot; ''PROSPECTIONS'', autumn 2022. &lt;https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3&gt;<br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012<br /> <br /> Easterling K. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014<br /> <br /> ''Entangled Transparency 3.0.'' ZKM, Karlsruhe. Online conference, 2023. &lt;https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30&gt;<br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011&lt;http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32&gt;<br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017 &lt;https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/&gt;<br /> <br /> Gorionuva, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> Gorionova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> Grossers, Ben. ''Safebook'', 2019. &lt;https://bengrosser.com/projects/safebook/&gt; <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002<br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019 &lt;http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship&gt;<br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA ) | vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505<br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012. &lt;http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/&gt;<br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435&gt;<br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole, editors. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Press, 2015<br /> <br /> Peeters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015<br /> <br /> Pisuisse, Frederique and Helgason, Saemundur Thor. ''Cosmos Carl''. &lt;https://cosmoscarl.com/&gt;<br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553&gt;<br /> <br /> Rocha, Jara; Snelting, Femke and Helen Pritchard. ''Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program'', The Underground Division, London, 2020<br /> <br /> http://ddivision.xyz/<br /> <br /> Valk, Marloes de. ''Damaged Earth Catalogue''. &lt;https://damaged.bleu255.com/&gt;<br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90<br /> <br /> Woodgate, Agustina; Gomez, Miquel Hervas and Krischock, Sascha.''VPN,'' 2019.<br /> <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2510 2023-06-19T13:18:29Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> = Freja Kir – =<br /> <br /> = Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech =<br /> Keywords: <br /> <br /> == Abstract: ==<br /> This paper directs attention to the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. It does so by enhancing the understanding of minor tech through the analysis and case study of the artwork, VPN. While Minor Tech might sound unfamiliar to the many, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar through examples of digital commoning, sharing of skills, and organisational systems. In the case of VPN, the work existed as a growing emancipatory multimedia archive, executed as a transparent server architecture revealing its technical workings to its users. This format exemplified tactics of intentional glitches through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. By identifying the elements of tactics and care within the VPN, the paper draws parallels of overlapping tendencies within the movement of minor tech. Drawing on Olga Gorionova's research on 'Shadow librarians' and including former digital examples of knowledge sharing furthermore assists in sketching a web development towards the nature of minor tech and VPN. By analysing the significance of these initiatives, the paper raises the questions: What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> == Introducing ==<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> == An emancipatory file server ==<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2, VPN Network map]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider the intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the different ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an expanding relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN provides a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. The drive of critically exposing infrastructural systems is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, ‘Possible Bodies’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> == Chronological tech ==<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures. <br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape, to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior, be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.[[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Screenshot: March, 2023 ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> == Minor Tech ==<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving minor tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. However, while minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services, some of which will be returned to later in the paper. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the digitally located Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech is presented as “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> == Tactical tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4, Page from VPN reader]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN, as well as minor tech, intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici). <br /> <br /> == Glitchy tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction (Star and Ruhleder), reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects. One example is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. Minor tech, and specifically the VPN if considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the sharing aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper. This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> == Caring tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader ]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative to those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. As counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies such a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> == Conclusion ==<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Situating the VPN and minor tech in parallel with each other allows us to address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> == Works cited ==<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989&gt;<br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', MIT Press, 1999<br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018<br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017 &lt;https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086&gt;<br /> <br /> Cochior, Cristina; Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha. &quot;Digital Discomfort.&quot; ''PROSPECTIONS'', autumn 2022. &lt;https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3&gt;<br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012<br /> <br /> Easterling K. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014<br /> <br /> ''Entangled Transparency 3.0.'' ZKM, Karlsruhe. Online conference, 2023. &lt;https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30&gt;<br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011&lt;http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32&gt;<br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017 &lt;https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/&gt;<br /> <br /> Gorionuva, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> Gorionova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> Grossers, Ben. ''Safebook'', 2019. &lt;https://bengrosser.com/projects/safebook/&gt; <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002<br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019 &lt;http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship&gt;<br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA ) | vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505<br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012. &lt;http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/&gt;<br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435&gt;<br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole, editors. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Press, 2015<br /> <br /> Peeters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015<br /> <br /> Pisuisse, Frederique and Helgason, Saemundur Thor. ''Cosmos Carl''. &lt;https://cosmoscarl.com/&gt;<br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553&gt;<br /> <br /> Rocha, Jara; Snelting, Femke and Helen Pritchard. ''Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program'', The Underground Division, London, 2020<br /> <br /> http://ddivision.xyz/<br /> <br /> Valk, Marloes de. ''Damaged Earth Catalogue''. &lt;https://damaged.bleu255.com/&gt;<br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90<br /> <br /> Woodgate, Agustina; Gomez, Miquel Hervas and Krischock, Sascha.''VPN,'' 2019.<br /> <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2508 2023-06-19T12:22:48Z

<p>Freja Kir: /* Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech */</p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> = Freja Kir – =<br /> <br /> = Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech =<br /> Keywords: <br /> <br /> == Abstract: ==<br /> This paper directs attention to the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. It does so by enhancing the understanding of minor tech through the analysis and case study of the artwork, VPN. While Minor Tech might sound unfamiliar to the many, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar through examples of digital commoning, sharing of skills, and organisational systems. In the case of VPN, the work existed as a growing emancipatory multimedia archive, executed as a transparent server architecture revealing its technical workings to its users. This format exemplified tactics of intentional glitches through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. By identifying the elements of tactics and care within the VPN, the paper draws parallels of overlapping tendencies within the movement of minor tech. Drawing on Olga Gorionova's research on 'Shadow librarians' and including former digital examples of knowledge sharing furthermore assists in sketching a web development towards the nature of minor tech and VPN. By analysing the significance of these initiatives, the paper raises the questions: What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> == Introducing ==<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> == An emancipatory file server ==<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2, VPN Network map]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider the intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the different ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an expanding relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN provides a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. The drive of critically exposing infrastructural systems is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, ‘Possible Bodies’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> == Chronological tech ==<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures. <br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape, to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior, be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.[[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Screenshot: March, 2023 ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> == Minor Tech ==<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving minor tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. However, while minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services, some of which will be returned to later in the paper. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the digitally located Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech is presented as “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> == Tactical tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4, Page from VPN reader]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN, as well as minor tech, intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici). <br /> <br /> == Glitchy tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction (Star and Ruhleder), reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects. One example is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. Minor tech, and specifically the VPN if considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the sharing aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper. This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> == Caring tech ==<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader ]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative to those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. As counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies such a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> == Conclusion ==<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Situating the VPN and minor tech in parallel with each other allows us to address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> == Works cited ==<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989&gt;<br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', MIT Press, 1999<br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018<br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017 &lt;https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086&gt;<br /> <br /> Cochior, Cristina; Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha. &quot;Digital Discomfort.&quot; ''PROSPECTIONS'', autumn 2022. &lt;https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3&gt;<br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012<br /> <br /> Easterling K. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014<br /> <br /> ''Entangled Transparency 3.0.'' ZKM, Karlsruhe. Online conference, 2023. &lt;https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30&gt;<br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011&lt;http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32&gt;<br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017 &lt;https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/&gt;<br /> <br /> Gorionuva, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> Gorionova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> Grossers, Ben. ''Safebook'', 2019. &lt;https://bengrosser.com/projects/safebook/&gt; <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002<br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019 &lt;http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship&gt;<br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA ) | vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505<br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012. &lt;http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/&gt;<br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435&gt;<br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole, editors. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Press, 2015<br /> <br /> Peeters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015<br /> <br /> Pisuisse, Frederique and Saemundur Thor Helgason. ''Cosmos Carl''. &lt;https://cosmoscarl.com/&gt;<br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553&gt;<br /> <br /> Rocha, Jara; Femke Snelting and Helen Pritchard. ''Possible Bodies''. Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program (2020) with The Underground Division, London<br /> <br /> Valk, Marloes de. ''Damaged Earth Catalogue''. &lt;https://damaged.bleu255.com/&gt;<br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90<br /> <br /> Woodgate, Agustina; Miquel Hervas Gomez and Sascha Krischock.''VPN,'' 2019.<br /> <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2303 2023-06-16T09:52:06Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> == Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech ==<br /> <br /> === Introducing ===<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> === An emancipatory file server ===<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2, VPN Network map]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider the intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the different ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an expanding relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN provides a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. The drive of critically exposing infrastructural systems is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, ‘Possible Bodies’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> === Chronological tech ===<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures. <br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape, to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior, be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.[[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Screenshot: March, 2023 ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> === Minor Tech ===<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving minor tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. However, while minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services, some of which will be returned to later in the paper. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the digitally located Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech is presented as “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> === Tactical tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4, Page from VPN reader]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN, as well as minor tech, intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici). <br /> <br /> === Glitchy tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction (Star and Ruhleder), reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects. One example is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. Minor tech, and specifically the VPN if considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the sharing aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper. This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> === Caring tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader ]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative to those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. As counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies such a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> === Conclusion ===<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Situating the VPN and minor tech in parallel with each other allows us to address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989<br /> <br /> <br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', MIT Press, 1999<br /> <br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018<br /> <br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086<br /> <br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012<br /> <br /> <br /> Easterling K. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014<br /> <br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011<br /> <br /> http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionuva, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017 <br /> <br /> https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/<br /> <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002<br /> <br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019<br /> <br /> http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship<br /> <br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA ) | vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505<br /> <br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012<br /> <br /> http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/<br /> <br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435<br /> <br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole, editors. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Peeters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553<br /> <br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90<br /> <br /> <br /> Other sources:<br /> <br /> Online conference. (2023). Entangled Transparency 3.0, ZKM, Karlsruhe, https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30 <br /> <br /> VPN. (2019). Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock <br /> <br /> Damaged Earth Catalogue. Marloes de Valk. https://damaged.bleu255.com/ Visited: March 2023 <br /> <br /> <br /> BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice (2021/2022), the Cell for Digital Discomfort—composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha, https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Possible Bodies. Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting featuring Helen Pritchard. Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program (2020) with The Underground Division, London<br /> <br /> <br /> Ben Grossers Safebook, 2019<br /> <br /> https://bengrosser.com/projects/safebook/<br /> <br /> <br /> Cosmos Carl, Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason<br /> <br /> https://cosmoscarl.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2299 2023-06-16T09:48:41Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> == Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech ==<br /> <br /> === Introducing ===<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> === An emancipatory file server ===<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2, VPN Network map]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider the intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the different ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an expanding relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN provides a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. While the infrastructure of the VPN worked to amplify the institutional digital infrastructure, this drive of critically exposing infrastructures is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, ‘Possible Bodies’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> === Chronological tech ===<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures. <br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape, to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior, be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.[[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Screenshot: March, 2023 ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> === Minor Tech ===<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving minor tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. However, while minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services, some of which will be returned to later in the paper. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the digitally located Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech is presented as “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> === Tactical tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4, Page from VPN reader]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN, as well as minor tech, intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici). <br /> <br /> === Glitchy tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction (Star and Ruhleder), reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects. One example is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. Minor tech, and specifically the VPN if considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the sharing aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper. This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> === Caring tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader ]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative to those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. As counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies such a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> === Conclusion ===<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Situating the VPN and minor tech in parallel with each other allows us to address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989<br /> <br /> <br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', MIT Press, 1999<br /> <br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018<br /> <br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086<br /> <br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012<br /> <br /> <br /> Easterling K. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014<br /> <br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011<br /> <br /> http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionuva, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017 <br /> <br /> https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/<br /> <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002<br /> <br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019<br /> <br /> http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship<br /> <br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA ) | vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505<br /> <br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012<br /> <br /> http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/<br /> <br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435<br /> <br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole, editors. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Peeters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553<br /> <br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90<br /> <br /> <br /> Other sources:<br /> <br /> Online conference. (2023). Entangled Transparency 3.0, ZKM, Karlsruhe, https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30 <br /> <br /> VPN. (2019). Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock <br /> <br /> Damaged Earth Catalogue. Marloes de Valk. https://damaged.bleu255.com/ Visited: March 2023 <br /> <br /> <br /> BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice (2021/2022), the Cell for Digital Discomfort—composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha, https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Possible Bodies. Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting featuring Helen Pritchard. Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program (2020) with The Underground Division, London<br /> <br /> <br /> Ben Grossers Safebook, 2019<br /> <br /> https://bengrosser.com/projects/safebook/<br /> <br /> <br /> Cosmos Carl, Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason<br /> <br /> https://cosmoscarl.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2279 2023-06-15T20:51:51Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> == Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech ==<br /> <br /> === Introducing ===<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections considers thetechno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> === An emancipatory file server ===<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2, VPN Network map]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider this intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the possible ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen. (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an increasing relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN exemplifies a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. While the infrastructure of the VPN worked to amplify the institutional digital infrastructure, this drive of critically exposing infrastructures is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, ‘Possible Bodies’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> === Chronological tech ===<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. <br /> <br /> The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures.<br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior in her recent performative keynote lecture for the online conference Entangled Transparencies (2023), Center for Art and Media (ZKM), be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.[[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media, Screenshot: March, 2023 ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> === Minor Tech ===<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before earlier in the year, contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving Minor Tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. While minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech presents “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> === Tactical tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4, Page from VPN reader]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici). <br /> <br /> === Glitchy tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction, reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects (Star and Ruhleder). One case is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. The VPN, considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the commoning aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper.<br /> <br /> This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> === Caring tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader ]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative for those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. While counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> === Conclusion ===<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Analyzing the VPN through the objective of minor tech lets us address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989<br /> <br /> <br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', MIT Press, 1999<br /> <br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018<br /> <br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086<br /> <br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012<br /> <br /> <br /> Easterling K. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014<br /> <br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011<br /> <br /> http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionuva, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017 <br /> <br /> https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/<br /> <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002<br /> <br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019<br /> <br /> http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship<br /> <br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA ) | vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505<br /> <br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012<br /> <br /> http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/<br /> <br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435<br /> <br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole, editors. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Peeters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553<br /> <br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90<br /> <br /> <br /> Other sources:<br /> <br /> Online conference. (2023). Entangled Transparency 3.0, ZKM, Karlsruhe, https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30 <br /> <br /> VPN. (2019). Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock <br /> <br /> Damaged Earth Catalogue. Marloes de Valk. https://damaged.bleu255.com/ Visited: March 2023 <br /> <br /> <br /> BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice (2021/2022), the Cell for Digital Discomfort—composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha, https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Possible Bodies. Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting featuring Helen Pritchard. Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program (2020) with The Underground Division, London<br /> <br /> <br /> Ben Grossers Safebook, 2019<br /> <br /> https://bengrosser.com/projects/safebook/<br /> <br /> <br /> Cosmos Carl, Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason<br /> <br /> https://cosmoscarl.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2278 2023-06-15T20:51:20Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> == Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech ==<br /> <br /> === Introducing ===<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections considers thetechno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> === An emancipatory file server ===<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2, VPN Network map]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider this intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the possible ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen. (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an increasing relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN exemplifies a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. While the infrastructure of the VPN worked to amplify the institutional digital infrastructure, this drive of critically exposing infrastructures is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, ‘Possible Bodies’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> === Chronological tech ===<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. <br /> <br /> The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures.<br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior in her recent performative keynote lecture for the online conference Entangled Transparencies (2023), Center for Art and Media (ZKM), be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.[[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media, Screenshot: March, 2023 ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> === Minor Tech ===<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before earlier in the year, contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving Minor Tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. While minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech presents “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> === Tactical tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4, Page from VPN reader]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici). <br /> <br /> === Glitchy tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction, reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects (Star and Ruhleder). One case is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. The VPN, considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the commoning aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper.<br /> <br /> This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> === Caring tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader ]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative for those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. While counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> === Conclusion ===<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Analyzing the VPN through the objective of minor tech lets us address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989<br /> <br /> <br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', MIT Press, 1999<br /> <br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018<br /> <br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086<br /> <br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012<br /> <br /> <br /> Easterling K. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014<br /> <br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011<br /> <br /> http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionuva, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017 <br /> <br /> https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/<br /> <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002<br /> <br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019<br /> <br /> http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship<br /> <br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA ) | vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505<br /> <br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012<br /> <br /> http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/<br /> <br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435<br /> <br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole, editors. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Peeters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553<br /> <br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90<br /> <br /> <br /> Other sources:<br /> <br /> Online conference. (2023). Entangled Transparency 3.0, ZKM, Karlsruhe, https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30 <br /> <br /> VPN. (2019). Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock <br /> <br /> Damaged Earth Catalogue. Marloes de Valk. https://damaged.bleu255.com/ Visited: March 2023 <br /> <br /> BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice (2021/2022), the Cell for Digital Discomfort—composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha, https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3<br /> <br /> <br /> Possible Bodies. Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting featuring Helen Pritchard. Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program (2020) with The Underground Division, London<br /> <br /> <br /> Ben Grossers Safebook, 2019<br /> <br /> https://bengrosser.com/projects/safebook/<br /> <br /> <br /> Cosmos Carl, Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason<br /> <br /> https://cosmoscarl.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=2277 2023-06-15T20:46:35Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>[[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> == Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech ==<br /> <br /> === Introducing ===<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries. In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to denote and substitute digital power structures critically. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics of digital knowledge sharing to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the significance of its transparent server architectures and parallels with the care, conditions, and drives of the minor tech movement that critically rejects digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections consider the techno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study and theoretical framework that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of minor tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; and finally, the last sections considers thetechno-cultural gestures between minor tech, knowledge sharing and artistic examples, including drives and the aspect of care and maintenance.<br /> <br /> === An emancipatory file server ===<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> The first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material. [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2, VPN Network map]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this incident, the Sandberg Instituut), the IT department and the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged and exposed by the instalment of the VPN. <br /> <br /> As the VPN both enacts a platform environment and exposes its infrastructural server architecture across different locations, it becomes relevant to consider this intertwined nature between infrastructure and platform studies to situate the VPN and minor tech within a broader context of media studies. A critical inspection of both infrastructures and digital platforms often requires considering the means for observing. Directing attention to the possible ways of making infrastructures more approachable is nothing new. In the field of urban studies, this approach requires seeing not only buildings, shapes and outlines but also the wires and operating systems that shape a city, including considering the conditions that produce such standardised systems (Easterling; Parks and Starosielski). Relatedly, although platform systems are most often systematically and algorithmically guarded, their shapes seem incomprehensible to grasp and are often only possible to imagine (Gillespie). If approaching the platform shape as an imaging technology, artworks such as VPN make possible a three-dimensional entrance to envision the technical actions behind the two-dimensional screen. (Siegert). In this context, infrastructure studies contribute a valuable sociotechnical consideration of expansive and often governed systems and services related to digital platforms at various scales (Plantin, 2016). <br /> <br /> The parallels between the artwork VPN and the movement of minor tech are strongly driven by the activation and exposure of critical infrastructures and the systematic distance to digital corporate platforms services. Approaching the VPN and minor tech as examples of an increasing relation between infrastructure and platformization studies possibly also reflects an expanding horizon within digitally related media studies that allows for an increase of alternative objectives such as artistic studies.<br /> <br /> With reference to Kellers Easterlings’ call for active, creative approaches to cooperate infrastructures, the example brought forward by the VPN exemplifies a transparent server architecture which unveils an active format for exploiting software workings at a local scale. While the infrastructure of the VPN worked to amplify the institutional digital infrastructure, this drive of critically exposing infrastructures is attracting increasing attention from various sites of academic, spatial and artistic practice, and several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are, for instance, exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, ‘Possible Bodies’, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the ‘Cell for Digital Discomfort’, formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects is their critical, collective knowledge that points to the complex realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments.<br /> <br /> === Chronological tech ===<br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. In a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. <br /> <br /> The public debate brings forth an example of a possible increasing public engagement in digital development and alternatives to corporate digital power structures.<br /> <br /> A rough outline of the web, from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today, is relevant to understanding the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics in order to contextualise the significance of minor tech historically.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior in her recent performative keynote lecture for the online conference Entangled Transparencies (2023), Center for Art and Media (ZKM), be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. Connecting these drives to the different web periods, Bogna presented “wormholes and hidden narratives” of the structure of the internet. When considering the significance and accomplishments of creative tactics and minor tech alternatives throughout web history, introducing early cyberspace that was imagined as wild, free and counter-cultural is relevant.[[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media, Screenshot: March, 2023 ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favourable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran; Lovink). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making. <br /> <br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the worldwide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities.<br /> <br /> === Minor Tech ===<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of minor tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of ‘Minor Tech’ was unheard of to me before earlier in the year, contributing to the workshop ‘Towards a Minor Tech’ organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of minor tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving Minor Tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of minor tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of minor tech: firstly, that minor tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that minor tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. While minor tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of minor tech presents “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of minor tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of minor tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms.<br /> <br /> === Tactical tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4, Page from VPN reader]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink pp 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Tania Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google is the internet” (Peeters 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as minor tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici). <br /> <br /> === Glitchy tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> While we often become aware of infrastructures only when they glitch or malfunction, reverting the glitch as an intentional tactic can be detected in various ways across critical, creative projects (Star and Ruhleder). One case is the creation of computational ‘Algorythmics’ by media researcher Shintaro Miyazaki, which as a technical tool, would trace and track algorithms by adding sounds to their workings and thereby also reveal their occasional malfunctions (Miyazaki); Ben Grossers ‘Safebook’ application, did not detect, but rather trigger an intentional malfunction of the Facebook interface by stripping its content down to its bare soft grey scroll; and finally, a digital platform initiative such as Cosmos Carl, which gathers and supports creative inventions that provoke glitches in conventional platform services through intentional misusage. <br /> <br /> The broken interface that VPN presents us with allows a peak into the digital components that make up the interface, and by considering how these occupy and create space and situate and guide their users, the VPN arguably pushes its users from knowing about the existence of the infrastructure to understanding that infrastructure. <br /> <br /> However, while the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to minor tech and artistic examples assists in contextualizing their drives and intentions. It includes a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art”). While the technical posthumanism that Olga Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is helpful to consider how the VPN, for instance, presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centred automated services, allowing glitches and failures to produce reasoning. The VPN, considered as a transparent server architecture for knowledge sharing, sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies and comes to echo an effort of digital commoning. While the commons often refers to the commoning aspects of land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems (Federici), the thriving drive for radical movements and alternatives to capitalist models, along with aspects such as knowledge sharing, non-hierarchical organizing and collective decision-making processes likewise apply to the artistic contributions and minor tech presented in this paper.<br /> <br /> This inclusive nature follows the ongoing determination for transparency within mechanical transactions (Braidotti). In this context, the posthumanist lens inevitably contributes an intersection of both the material and immaterial, which in the context of minor tech, unveils the intersection of technological structures, collaborative practice, and non-hierarchical structures – be it through glitches, tactics or alternative tools.<br /> <br /> === Caring tech ===<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader ]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to become a system of maintenance and care eventually. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learning. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. <br /> <br /> To consider the significance of nurturing labour behind the VPN and minor tech, the work by Goriunova on ‘Shadow librarians’ enlightens the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. To consider how knowledge commons, in this case, digital libraries, are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in interactions with humans and non-humans. Defining ‘meta librarians’, ‘public custodians’, ‘general librarians’, ‘underground librarians’, ‘critical public pedagogues’, ‘multiform bibliographers’, ‘fancy general archivists’, and ‘cultural analysts’, Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians. ‘Shadow librarians’ provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons”; Marcell and Medak). These tasks not only remind us of the previously mentioned Damaged Earth Catalog but also resemble knowledge-sharing and caring structures of several critical projects from the early digital era. Considering minor tech in the extension of former critical technical accomplishments helps sketch the longer-term relevance of minor tech accomplishments. However, to concretize and embed the tasks of the amateur historians and librarians close, we detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, the co-founder (and also my dad) of Leksikon.org fulfils the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia leksikon.org. With a motto that ‘doubt everything’ and an About section that states how the encyclopedia ‘is not, and does not, intend to be neutral’, the tone is set. [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative for those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org originates in the Web 1.0 era and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). While Leksikon.org is not driven as a counteraction to large-scale digital platforms like minor tech or the VPN, it draws on similar efforts for bottom-up knowledge generation and sharing. This approach to the encyclopedia is not unique but draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82), which, through cheap printed catalogues, gathered and provided knowledge from an international radical left point of view. The organizational structure of Leksikon.org is made up of a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. Similar to many minor tech initiatives, the content is hosted on a private server, which reflects both financial constraints and protection from right-wing hacks. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that projects like Leksion.org require. The work behind leksikon.org consists of multiple late-night hours in front of a stationary computer, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. While counter-publics often occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner), Leksion.org exemplifies a techno-cultural drive for knowledge sharing to an engaged public through the various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and translating knowledge. Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. Despite its differences, Leksikon.org contributes an example of a digital predecessor to minor tech. It constitutes an example of disobeying conventional knowledge sources and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions can take form. <br /> <br /> === Conclusion ===<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Analyzing the VPN through the objective of minor tech lets us address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*.” ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'', vol 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989<br /> <br /> <br /> Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. ''Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real'', trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015,  pp. 121-146.<br /> <br /> <br /> Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences'', MIT Press, 1999<br /> <br /> <br /> Braidotti, Rosi, and Hlavajova, Maria. ''Posthuman Glossary'', Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018<br /> <br /> <br /> Bucher, Tania. “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” ''Information, Communication &amp; Society'', vol 20 no. 1, pp. 30-44, 2017<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086<br /> <br /> <br /> Curran, James. ''Rethinking internet history'', Routledge, 2012<br /> <br /> <br /> Easterling K. ''Extrastatecraft'', Verso, 2014<br /> <br /> <br /> Federici, Silvia. “Feminism and the politics of the Commons.” ''The Commoner'', 2011<br /> <br /> http://&amp;#x20;journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionuva, Olga. “Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art.” ''A Companion to Digital Art'', edited by Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016<br /> <br /> <br /> Gorionova, Olga. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” ''Aesthetics of the Commons'', edited by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder, 2021, pp. 41-61<br /> <br /> <br /> Gillespie, Tarleton. “The platform metaphor, revisited.” ''Digital Society Blog'', 2017 <br /> <br /> https://www.hiig.de/en/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/<br /> <br /> <br /> Lovink, Geert. ''Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture'', Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002<br /> <br /> <br /> Mars, Marcell and Medak, Marcell. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” ''Ephemera 19'', no. 2, 2019<br /> <br /> http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/against-innovation-compromised-institutional-agency-and-acts-custodianship<br /> <br /> <br /> Monteagudu, Graciela. “Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici”, ''North American Congress on Latin America'' (NACLA ) | vol. 51, no. 3, 2019, pp. 256-261 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505<br /> <br /> <br /> Miyazaki, Shintaro. “Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures.” ''Computational Culture,'' vol. 2, 2012<br /> <br /> http://computationalculture.net/algorhythmics-understanding-micro-temporality-in-computational-cultures/<br /> <br /> <br /> Parisi, Luciana. &quot;Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality.&quot; ''Theory, Culture &amp; Society'', Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 95-124, 2019<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764198435<br /> <br /> <br /> Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole, editors. ''Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures'', Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Peeters, John Durham. ''The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media'', University of Chicago Press, 2015<br /> <br /> <br /> Plantin, Jean-Christophe. “Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook.” ''New media and society'', vol, 20, nr. 1, pp. 1–18, 2016<br /> <br /> https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553<br /> <br /> <br /> Warner, Michael. &quot;Publics and Counterpublics.&quot; ''Public Culture'', Duke University Press, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49-90<br /> <br /> Online conference. (2023). Entangled Transparency 3.0, ZKM, Karlsruhe, https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30<br /> <br /> VPN. (2019). Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock <br /> <br /> Damaged Earth Catalogue. Marloes de Valk. https://damaged.bleu255.com/ Visited: March 2023 <br /> <br /> BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice (2021/2022), the Cell for Digital Discomfort—composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha, https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3<br /> <br /> Possible Bodies. Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting featuring Helen Pritchard. Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program (2020) with The Underground Division, London</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=1686 2023-04-26T09:13:26Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]<br /> <br /> == '''Glitchy, Caring, Tactical: A relational study between artistic tactics and Minor Tech''' ==<br /> <br /> ===== Introducing =====<br /> As commercial digital platforms enable and constrain social action in various domains, their elusive structures increasingly govern spatially dispersed entities through digital devices, measurements, and registries (Ferrari &amp; Graham, 2021). In order to critically engage with new developments at this scale, it is crucial to understand their drivers and, in this case, how resistant practices are helping to critically denote and substitute digital power structures. <br /> <br /> In this paper, I trace and discuss the parameters of creative resistance to large-scale commercial digital platforms. With a contemporary focus, I draw on historical examples of creative counter-tactics and technological developments to address this tendency. By analyzing the participatory fileserver and artwork, VPN, I bring particular attention to the care, conditions, and drives of Minor Tech and creative works that mimic and critically display digital platform operations. What are the drives across creative resistance practices? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance various existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? <br /> <br /> The chapter is divided into six sections: Diving straight into the personal encounter with VPN, I first introduce the artistic case study that will unfold throughout the chapter; secondly, I include a historical, technological context, which supports the following third section of introducing the concept and notion of Minor Tech; in the fourth section I look to the doings of VPN through the objective of artistic tactical media; finally, the two last sections consider the drives of the projects and the aspect of care and maintenance present throughout the examples of the paper. <br /> <br /> The insights to the case study draw on conversations with one-third of the collective artists behind VPN, Agustina Woodgate. The conversations were partly recorded and inspired by an open-ended format, allowing the topics to develop in unpredictable ways. These insights have been divided into sections throughout the paper to adapt a basic understanding of the relation between VPN and Minor Tech.<br /> <br /> ===== An emancipatory file server =====<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on your smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. Scattered letters start interfering with the scroll: “Nodes are elastic homes and links are dynamic roads, and each one is guiding you through a different story.” (VPN screen excerpt).<br /> [[File:Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment.png|center|thumb|322x322px|Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 1). If reaching this screen intervention, you have reached the landing page and are physically near one of the nodes connected to the VPN installation. From this spot, all visitors have access to read and contribute to the growing archive of written, visual, and recorded content of the artwork and emancipatory fileserver, VPN. <br /> <br /> My first personal encounter with VPN was when it served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) (2019). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user’s scroll. Functioning as an open-source instrument, VPN was presented as a framework for circulating knowledge through shared visual, lingual, and vocal material.<br /> [[File:Figure 2, VPN Network map.png|center|thumb|320x320px|Figure 2, VPN Network map]]<br /> During the graduation show, this format allowed the nodes to serve as a live feed, growing collective archive, and local navigational information service across four fixed nodes and one nomadic connected to the network. Technically, one node functioned as a server; the second was for the live feed; a third would capture sound; the fourth hosted visuals; and finally, the fifth one was for the text. Across these structures, a proxy had been installed to replace the content provided at each location. With each node installed in various locations, the interface would accordingly adopt and present the archive differently depending on the specific location. <br /> <br /> While VPN is site-specific and activated through physical interaction, the VPN is simultaneously scalable and can be installed to work in any context. With a technical set-up that relies on servers of its host institution (in this case, the Sandberg Instituut), not only the IT department but the bureaucratic aspects of the internal academic digital network structures got challenged by the request to install the VPN. In this case, the existence of the VPN infrastructure likewise amplified the institutional digital infrastructure. Understanding infrastructures not only as systems for distribution but, more specifically, as promoters of socio-political, economic, and technological worlds enlighten how paying attention to both material and immaterial systems helps determine structures of behavior and patterns in digital realms (Berlant, 2016).<br /> <br /> Although I dedicate specific attention to VPN, several recent artistic initiatives pursue like-minded, disobedient-action-driven research toward alternative narratives. Such initiatives are for instance exemplified by the critical collaborative artistic and academic research group, Possible Bodies, initiated by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting. Their doings are focused on (but not limited to) the intersection of physical ground and digital sphere, which for instance, is the case in their Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, initiating collective skills for sensing data and investigating contemporary scanning practices through magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and computer tomography. Another related collective example is the Cell for Digital Discomfort formed as a part of the 2021/2022 BAK fellowship for Situated Practices, which specifically looked into ways of refusing dominant digital platforms, referred to as “totalitarian innovation”. This focus stressed the solution-oriented approach of mono-cultural and corporate digital platforms with little (if any) room for investigating otherwise. Similar to these projects are their critical, collective knowledge that points to the hard realities of discriminating and data mining tech environments. <br /> <br /> ===== Chronological tech =====<br /> To understand the involvement and drives of opposing and independent critical, creative tactics, I briefly turn to a rough outline of the web from its anonymous and hardly accessible shape to its seducing and omnipresent power structure of today. <br /> <br /> When recently attending a debate at the Danish parliament on the critical influences of digital and artificial intelligence at work, the meeting was joined by people from various backgrounds; unions and think tanks, lawyers, doctors, software developers, teachers, and academics sharing observations on the influence of digital developments in everyday life. While opposing opinions were shared, most concerns were reappearing: the protection of data, the lack of democratic process pace to align with technological developments, and finally, a quest for independent initiatives, be it through academic networks, critical workshops, or critical creativity. Taking place in a European context, reasons such as GDPR, the expansion of chat GPT, and critical media coverage boosted by whistleblowing and leaked private data probably all played a role in leveraging such critical digital awareness. The experience was cheerful in that it reminded of engagement in critical digital action, which is otherwise mainly witnessed in academic and specific cultural contexts.<br /> <br /> While web history has many layers, its differences can, as pointed to by Prof. Bogna Konior in her recent performative keynote lecture for the online conference ''Entangled Transparencies'' (2023), Center for Art and Media (ZKM), be simplified down to the drives for money, data, identity, and anonymity. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2023-03-09 at 10.37.41.jpg|center|thumb|300x300px|Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media, Screenshot: March, 2023 ]]<br /> Naturally, looking into the history of the internet reflects more than money, data, and identity but also the development of technologies, ethics, and values. From being an exclusive site of military initiatives and favorable ways to proceed with academic research, Web 1.0 presented a system of static one-way interactions that, despite developing into a public domain, had limited bandwidth and user access (Curran, 2012; Lovink, 2002). With Web 2.0 (2004), the world wide web introduced a digital platform for user interaction. Web 2.0, with its myriad of tracking algorithms and commercial drives, presented us with automated profile generations and data-hungry thriving digital platforms across various fields (social media, search engines, shopping). In this context, networking services created a structure within which user-produced content could thrive and where online shopping boosted online money-making.<br /> In contrast to the financially driven hay-day giant platforms of Web 2.0, the introduction of Web 3.0 represented a web-based structure aimed at creating autonomous networks and increased privacy by implementing blockchain technologies and systems unchained from personalization. By proposing a cooperating solution, Web 3.0 exists as an alternative to the centralized structure of Internet 2.0 with its handful of dominant digital platforms (most notably Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft). However, while Web 3.0 was introduced nearly a decade ago, most digital platforms (and users) were shaped in the context of the world wide Web 2.0. Despite its decentralized mechanisms, Web 3.0 has not been adopted by most users but remains used by smaller, minor, counter-tech communities. <br /> <br /> ===== Minor Tech =====<br /> In essence, the Internet is based on a protocol system. In general terms, protocols structure the relation, order, and chronology between all units embedded in the network. This approach arguably turns the accessible and readable code into a force of the movement. The development of Minor Tech draws links to organized protocols, conscious computing, and digital services that offer alternative platform usage. Minor Tech is often organized around, within, and through small communities of users and often overlaps with significant movements of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. <br /> <br /> Admittedly the notion of Minor Tech was unheard of to me before earlier in the year, contributing to the workshop ''Towards a Minor Tech'' organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (LSBU). Before the workshop, I consulted a good friend and collaborator of mine with the intention of deepening my knowledge and discussing artistic practices concerning the topic. Instead, it turned out that the friend, too (active across various artistic and open-sourced initiatives and networks), needed to familiarize themselves with the notion of Minor Tech. While neither of us had come across the term before, the concept and values driving Minor Tech were familiar. When relating this paper to the topic of Minor Tech, this personal encounter seems relevant to mention, as I have come to realize that it also reflects a part of the nature of Minor Tech: firstly, that Minor Tech is (at the moment of writing) not known to the mass but to the dedicated minorities, and secondly, that Minor Tech reflects a set of values more than a methodological set of rules. While Minor Tech might be unfamiliar to the mass, examples of its existence are at the same time incredibly familiar in examples of digital commoning such as knowledge-sharing platforms and socializing services. <br /> <br /> With a nod to the Damaged Earth Catalogue, initiated by Marloes de Valk, the concept of Minor Tech presents “small” tech solutions that operate at a human scale and are motivated by a drive for digital privacy, resource minimalism, environmental consciousness, and collaborative communities. Minor Tech presents solutions for everyday-platform navigation that do not involve commercial platforms and leans towards a DIY approach driven by a critical response to the current Web 2.0 corporate platform giants. As a kind of Minor Tech initiative in itself, the Damaged Earth Catalogue functions as an “evaluation and access device” for tracing actions and initiatives of collaborative and intimate counter-reactions to capital, commercial, and political power. While the movement of Minor Tech can be traced with a focus on political connotations, it is in the context of this paper, not so much the political theme that I draw on, but rather examples of the forms of the tactics in use that exploits, mimic, and reshapes existing online infrastructures in the quest of critical alternatives to corporate digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ===== Tactical tech =====<br /> [[File:Figure 4, Page from VPN reader.jpg|center|thumb|Figure 4, Page from VPN reader]]<br /> Despite the scattered illustrations mentioned in the first section, what makes the case study of VPN of interest is not so much the meaning of the content but the physically dependent disruption of it. Under regular conditions, a server remains static; however, due to the disrupted content of VPN, the server transformed into an active element of the experience. The artists describe these disrupting features to display both “strength and weakness” (VPN reader). Thereby when generating a visual interface across the different locations, VPN revealed the physical process of the infrastructural system. By revealing the doings of the VPN, the VPN tactic was likewise inviting the user to understand the making of its infrastructure. <br /> Tactical media is not a new interruptive genre to the web but has been explored by activists, journalists, artists, and academics across several contexts. With an overall drive towards possible socio-economical digital changes, Geert Lovink promptly researches critical artistic digital media practices as tactical media. Tactical media is, by Lovink considered as a term that “retain mobility and velocity and avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialist questioning of everything” (Lovink, 2002, p. 271). In other words, tactical media opposes passive users of commercial digital norms and actively contributes to critical understandings and alternative environments. Besides existing as a critical method for approaching digital media environments, the creative nature of tactical media also require or triggers imagination from makers and users by changing the course of expectations and navigation. This link between general digital interaction and preassumed space is well-researched as “algorithmic imaginaries” by media researcher, Taina Bucher, to describe how mental representations and speculations about the workings of digital algorithms nudge users’ behaviors, interactions, and navigation (Bucher, 2017). However, while Bucher focuses on social media mechanisms, the artistically provoked imagination makes possible limitless outcomes for the creative mind. With this in mind, VPN intentionally disrupts the anticipated user interaction and challenges the traditional ways we imagine and interact with everyday digital media.<br /> <br /> VPN exemplifies a tendency in contemporary artistic production that intentionally (mis-)read, mimic, and replicate digital platform logic and behaviors through an artful inclusion of persons, space, and objects. However, it is difficult to deny that the most parasitic presence is not caused by minor or artistic counter-movements but rather by the large corporate digital platforms themselves – platforms that have the capacity to expand across digital activities, extract data and adjust algorithms for commercial intentions. Take Google, for example; being the most extensive digital search platform, Google presents itself as a company for search engine technologies, consumer electronics, and software. Meanwhile, the actual business model is based on advertising and data mining. As noted by John Durham Peeters, Google is of such an omnipresent scale that “For many, Google ''is'' the internet” (Peeters, 2015, p. 329). Similarly, the language and concepts of commoning practices, such as Minor Tech, are likewise misused and appropriated into capitalist systems (such as gift economy and digital management) (Federici, 2011). <br /> <br /> ===== Glitchy tech =====<br /> [[File:Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.jpg|center|thumb|321x321px|Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam]]<br /> As you move through the different VPN nodes, the content starts flickering. What in the previous location accumulated a stream of photos now provokes the activation of sound or moving images. At this point, the pace of the VPN interface has become more familiar, and the repetition of content disruption makes it possible to start detecting the interface influence of the work. <br /> <br /> The critical inclusion of artistic practice becomes relevant when considering the user experience of VPN as moving away from the human as the sole emperor setting standards for digital measurements. With this in mind, the VPN allows us to consider how digital components are part of constructing the interface and how these occupy and create space, situate and guide their users. As such, the VPN pushes its users from ''knowing'' about the existence of an infrastructure to ''understand'' that infrastructure.<br /> <br /> While the ability to perceive, analyze, and engage with material matter is central to critical humanistic studies, a posthumanist approach to VPN is relevant to critically consider its drives and intentions. The critical research by Olga Gorionuva specifically presents a study that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between software studies, artistic platforms, and cultural production online and questions the role of art in the context of the technological matter (Gorionova, 2006). While the technical posthumanism that Gorionova brings forth is introduced as a political tool for considering non-human species, it is useful to consider how the VPN presents and accumulates knowledge-sharing interventions as an attempt for renewed digital engagement. Considering the VPN from this approach sets an interesting example of how to reconfigure the meaning and understanding of specific technologies by introducing another social approach to the topic. From this position, the VPN suggests a twisted instrumentality as an alternative to data-centered automated services, allowing glitches and failure to produce reasoning. <br /> <br /> As an ideological function, the commons broadly embraces a leftist opposition to private properties, capitalist systems, and the state. While the commons and shared goods arguably have been threatened by neoliberal and fixated levels of privatization, a reason for the popularity of the commons is also the drive for radical movements and alternatives to those capitalist models. <br /> <br /> Despite being general in tone, this approach mainly refers to the commons in relation to land, natural resources, and related infrastructural systems - all material forms of commoning (Federici, 2011). Nevertheless, commoning aspects such as nonhierarchical organizing, collective decision-making processes, and rotation of leaderships (if any are needed), likewise apply to the collective work of Minor Tech, creative, and immaterial knowledge sharing.<br /> <br /> Reading into the posthuman commons as defined by feminist scholar Braidotti stresses her approach to posthumanism as a necessary process of acknowledging the collective nature of the self in relation to the world (Braidotti, 2013). This attention follows in line with the idea that along with posthuman commons comes the ongoing determination to make transparent any mechanical transaction or connection before the creation of common relations (Braidotti, 2013). <br /> <br /> Setting out to include posthumanism inevitably introduces an interdisciplinary lens that intersects both the material and immaterial. In the context of Minor Tech, posthuman commons are about unveiling technological structure through collaborative practice and doing so with skeptical awareness and the aim of discarding any hierarchical structures.<br /> <br /> ===== Caring tech =====<br /> [[File:Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader .jpg|center|thumb|265x265px|Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader ]]<br /> The technical complications of projects such as VPN exist of material limitations, from electricity plugs to internet connection. Starting as a software project, the VPN grew into a compilation of nodes, proxies, and hosting to eventually become a system of maintenance and care. <br /> <br /> While the front-end presentation of VPN content seems distorted, the contributions of the VPN database were locally accumulated and made up of internal publishing initiatives across the Sandberg Institute. Ironically, the messy reality of the data-collecting process simultaneously worked as a cross-departmental knowledge-sharing of internal learnings. Effectively, as more and more people were using the VPN, the more it became about maintenance, accessibility, and care. While the scale of this task was unpredicted, it became clear from the conversations with Agustina that the VPN was set up to trigger consciousness about infrastructural activity or, as written in the VPN reader: “to explore the possibilities of autonomous infrastructures by building a zone of trust and situated knowledge as a form of ontological anarchism opposing itself to the platformization of Institutions.”. <br /> <br /> To consider how knowledge commons (in this case, digital libraries) are generated and maintained, their subject positions are relevant in both interactions with humans and non-humans. To further address the nurturing labor and care that influence the artistic practices and Minor Tech communities, I draw inspiration from Gorionovas’ definition of the subject relevance for creative commoning knowledge sharing. Building on the notion of organizational aesthetics (as introduced in “Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet” (2012)), Gorinova describes the subject as always in process and never complete. <br /> <br /> Defining ''meta librarians, public custodians, general librarians, underground librarians, critical public pedagogues, multiform bibliographers, fancy general archivists,'' and ''cultural analysts'', Gorinova covers the understated tasks of amateur historians and librarians, full-time book-scanners, publishing, digitizing books, and activating collections. Shadow librarians provide and caretake online free and open infrastructures that enable users to share and debate digital texts and collections (Gorionova, 2021; Marcell &amp; Medak, 2019). Minor Tech practices inevitably fit into some of these ideas of shadow librarians and digital guardians of knowledge-sharing commons. Besides reminding of the Damaged Earth Catalog, several critical projects from the early digital era (such as the Whole Earth Catalog) resembles these roles of knowledge-sharing and caring structures. However, to concretize and reflect on the activities up close, I will detour to a personal encounter; <br /> <br /> Next to his computer engineering duties, my dad fulfills the role of a guardian, custodian, and amateur historian of the critical and politically charged online Danish encyclopedia, leksikon.org. With a leksion motto that “doubt everything” and an About section that states how the encyclopedia is not, and does not, intend to be neutral, the tone is set…<br /> [[File:Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend...jpg|center|thumb|200x200px|Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..]]<br /> Leksikon.org is a non-profit initiative run by volunteering engagement and initiated to produce an alternative narrative for those arriving from power positions. Leksikon.org dates back to an earlier era of digital knowledge sharing and predates the much more famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia (which did not register its domain before 2001). Leksikon.org draws inspiration from the Norwegian leftist publishing initiative PAX (1978-82) and is organized by a large number of contributors and translations of selected texts. While everyone can contribute, the submissions are filtered by smaller editorial groups of the organizing team. When scrolling through the different entries and the expansive country section (counting 247 entries), one inevitably stumbles on outdated spots, reflecting both how the process of updating such a project is immense and, at the same time also, the slower pace of caretaking that Leksion.org require. With my dad's background in computing and engineering, our home access to the internet was established in 1995; before this moment, the only possible connection had been limited to what was available on one server. My childhood is full of memories of my dad spending late night hours in front of a stationary computer in the corner of our living room, nourishing the encyclopedia, researching, translating, writing, and maintaining coding. <br /> <br /> Initiatives such as Leksion.org constitute possibilities of disobeying classical history books and forming new subject positions from which new sociopolitical directions take form. The various tasks of ordering, converting, sorting, and transforming content to be accessible in cases like this become techno-cultural gestures and drive for knowledge sharing to a larger public. <br /> <br /> While publishing content undoubtedly is a part of public-making, in the case of Minor Tech, the knowledge generation and sharing is produced and directed to minor small engaged publics. Borrowing from Michael Warners critical examination of the public, the conditions of possibilities for art in the public reminds us that counter-publics occur when there is little or no room for independent participation (Warner, 2005). Through caring and sharing communal structures, counter practices, in these cases, become tools that demonstrate knowledge as a process of public-making. <br /> <br /> ===== Conclusion =====<br /> While we struggle to make sense of how corporate digital developments activate and direct, manipulate, and exhaust online environments - creative works show the potential to reveal such fabrics by visualizing, materializing, or simulating everyday software operations. <br /> <br /> This writing presents artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of alternative artistic and technological practices. In this context, the VPN exemplifies a work that suggests how technical creative tactics may provoke interaction between the institution, the users, and their spatial surroundings. This kind of user interaction forms an analogy that makes us aware of the digital infrastructure and disrupts how most current corporate technology insists on smooth interaction that does not interrupt the experience. The VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level.<br /> <br /> Ultimately, the VPN aims to downscale technology to a graspable level. Analyzing the VPN through the objective of Minor Tech lets us address large tech critically while learning about small-scale tech intimately.<br /> <br /> <br /> ===== Colophon =====<br /> Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D:<br /> <br /> Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA<br /> <br /> Braidotti, R.&amp; Hlavajova, M.(2018). Posthuman Glossary, Bloomsbury<br /> <br /> Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.<br /> <br /> Curran J. (2012). Rethinking internet history, Routledge<br /> <br /> Federici, S. (2011) Feminism and the politics of the Commons. The Commoner. Available at: http:// journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/32 (accessed 28 March 2016).<br /> <br /> Gorionuva, O. (2006). Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art, in A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul, Wiley<br /> <br /> Gorionova, O.(2021). Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons, in Aesthetics of the Commons, Ed. Shusha Niederberger (ed.), Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), Felix Stalder (ed.)<br /> <br /> Lovink, G.(2002). Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, Cambridge: MIT Press<br /> <br /> Marcell, M. &amp;Medak, T.(2019). Against innovation: Compromised institutional agency and acts of custodianship, Ephemera journal, volume 19(2): 345-368<br /> <br /> Monteagudu, G.(2019). Women Reclaim the Commons: A Conversation with Silvia Federici, North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA ) | VOL. 51, NO. 3 — 256-261, &lt;nowiki&gt;http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1650505&lt;/nowiki&gt;<br /> <br /> Peeters, J. (2015). The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, University of Chicago Press<br /> <br /> Parisi, L.(2019) Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality, Goldsmiths, University of London<br /> <br /> Warner, M. (2005). Publics and Counterpublics, Zone Books, New York<br /> <br /> <br /> Online conference. (2023). Entangled Transparency 3.0, ZKM, Karlsruhe, &lt;nowiki&gt;https://zkm.de/en/event/2023/03/entangled-transparency-30&lt;/nowiki&gt;<br /> <br /> VPN. (2019). Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock <br /> <br /> Damaged Earth Catalogue. Marloes de Valk. &lt;nowiki&gt;https://damaged.bleu255.com/&lt;/nowiki&gt; Visited: March 2023 <br /> <br /> BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice (2021/2022), the Cell for Digital Discomfort—composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha, &lt;nowiki&gt;https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/on-digital-discomfort-editorial/#_ftn3&lt;/nowiki&gt;<br /> <br /> Possible Bodies. Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting featuring Helen Pritchard. Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program (2020) with The Underground Division, London</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:Figure_7,_Screenshot_from_Leksion.org_landing_page_and_Web1.0_look-a-like_frontend...jpg&diff=1685 2023-04-26T08:44:51Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Figure 7, Screenshot from Leksion.org landing page and Web1.0 look-a-like frontend..</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:Figure_6,_VPN_Network_hardware,_photo_from_VPN_reader_.jpg&diff=1684 2023-04-26T08:43:25Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Figure 6, VPN Network hardware, photo from VPN reader</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:Figure_5,_VPN_Node_at_Sandberg_Instituut,_Amsterdam.jpg&diff=1683 2023-04-26T08:42:02Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Figure 5, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:Figure_4,_Page_from_VPN_reader.jpg&diff=1682 2023-04-26T08:38:53Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Figure 4, Page from VPN reader</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:Screenshot_2023-03-09_at_10.37.41.jpg&diff=1681 2023-04-26T08:36:18Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Figure 3, Performance lecture, Bogna Konior, Entangled Transparencies, The Center for Art and Media, Screenshot: March, 2023</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:Figure_2,_VPN_Network_map.png&diff=1680 2023-04-26T08:31:35Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Figure 2, VPN Network map</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:Figure_1,_VPN_documentation_of_installment.png&diff=1679 2023-04-26T08:28:24Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Figure 1, VPN documentation of installment</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir5000&diff=1678 2023-04-26T08:25:45Z

<p>Freja Kir: Created page with &quot; Category:Toward a Minor Tech Category:5000 words&quot;</p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:5000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Contributors&diff=1149 2023-01-20T15:43:53Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>'''Christian Ulrik Andersen''', Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, is attempting to bring the knowledge and practices of digital culture and art to the fore.<br /> <br /> '''Geoff Cox''' is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University, and co-director of Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI).<br /> <br /> '''Camille Crichlow''' is a PhD Researcher at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (University College London). Her research interrogates how the historical and socio-cultural narrative of race manifests in contemporary algorithmic technologies.<br /> <br /> From a network of '''Feminist Servers''' the following authors contributed: mara karagianni - artist, software, sysadmin, ooooo - Transuniversal constellation, nate wessalowski - PhD student at Münster University, vo ezn - sound &amp;&amp; infrastructure artist.<br /> <br /> '''Teodora Sinziana Fartan''' is an artist and PhD researcher at CSNI, London South Bank University. <br /> <br /> '''Susanne Förster''' is a PhD candidate and research associate at the University of Siegen. Her work deals with imaginaries and infrastructures of conversational artificial agents.<br /> <br /> '''Inte Gloerich''' (Utrecht University &amp; Institute of Network Cultures) researches sociotechnical imaginaries around blockchain technology as they appear in for instance memes, startup culture, and art.<br /> <br /> '''Daniel Chávez Heras''' is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing at King's College London. He studies the computational production and analysis of visual culture.<br /> <br /> '''Jung-Ah Kim''' is a PhD researcher in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. She studies the relationship between weaving and computing and traditional Korean textiles.  <br /> <br /> '''Inga Luchs''' is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. In her research, she deals with questions of data classification and discrimination from a cultural and technical perspective.<br /> <br /> '''Gabriel Menotti''' is Associate Professor in Film &amp; Media at Queen's University and an independent curator. <br /> <br /> '''Alasdair Milne''' is a PhD researcher with Serpentine Galleries’ Creative AI Lab and King’s College London. His work focuses on the collaborative systems that emerge around new technologies.<br /> <br /> '''Anna Mladentseva''' is a PhD researcher at University College London whose project focuses on the conservation of software-based works of art and design from the Victoria &amp; Albert museum.<br /> <br /> '''Shusha Niederberger''' is a PhD researcher based at Zurich University of the Arts and working on user subject positions in datafied environments and aesthetic strategies of using otherwise.<br /> <br /> '''Søren Bro Pold''' Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, works with the arts of the interface and interface criticism.<br /> <br /> '''Winnie Soon''' is a Hong Kong-born artist coder and researcher, engaging with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals and digital censorship.<br /> <br /> '''Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver''' ferments data and investigates Critical Data and related practices through curating. She is Associate Professor in Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University.<br /> <br /> '''Varia''' is a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology. https://varia.zone<br /> <br /> '''Jack Wilson''' is a PhD researcher at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. He is not a conspiracy theorist. <br /> <br /> '''xenodata co-operative''' investigates image politics, algorithmic culture and technological conditions of knowledge production and governance through art and media practices. The collective is run by curator Yasemin Keskintepe and artist-researcher Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina.<br /> <br /> '''Sandy Di Yu''' is a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex and co-managing editor of DiSCo Journal (www.discojournal.com), using digital artist critique to examine shifting experiences of time.<br /> <br /> '''Freja Kir''' is researching across intersections of artistic methods, spatial publishing and digital media environments. Creatively directing fanfare – collective for visual communication. Contributing to stanza – studio for critical publishing. PhD researcher, University of West London.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Contributors&diff=1145 2023-01-20T15:43:26Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>'''Christian Ulrik Andersen''', Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, is attempting to bring the knowledge and practices of digital culture and art to the fore.<br /> <br /> '''Geoff Cox''' is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University, and co-director of Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI).<br /> <br /> '''Camille Crichlow''' is a PhD Researcher at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (University College London). Her research interrogates how the historical and socio-cultural narrative of race manifests in contemporary algorithmic technologies.<br /> <br /> From a network of '''Feminist Servers''' the following authors contributed: mara karagianni - artist, software, sysadmin, ooooo - Transuniversal constellation, nate wessalowski - PhD student at Münster University, vo ezn - sound &amp;&amp; infrastructure artist.<br /> <br /> '''Teodora Sinziana Fartan''' is an artist and PhD researcher at CSNI, London South Bank University. <br /> <br /> '''Susanne Förster''' is a PhD candidate and research associate at the University of Siegen. Her work deals with imaginaries and infrastructures of conversational artificial agents.<br /> <br /> '''Inte Gloerich''' (Utrecht University &amp; Institute of Network Cultures) researches sociotechnical imaginaries around blockchain technology as they appear in for instance memes, startup culture, and art.<br /> <br /> '''Daniel Chávez Heras''' is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing at King's College London. He studies the computational production and analysis of visual culture.<br /> <br /> '''Jung-Ah Kim''' is a PhD researcher in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. She studies the relationship between weaving and computing and traditional Korean textiles.  <br /> <br /> '''Inga Luchs''' is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. In her research, she deals with questions of data classification and discrimination from a cultural and technical perspective.<br /> <br /> '''Gabriel Menotti''' is Associate Professor in Film &amp; Media at Queen's University and an independent curator. <br /> <br /> '''Alasdair Milne''' is a PhD researcher with Serpentine Galleries’ Creative AI Lab and King’s College London. His work focuses on the collaborative systems that emerge around new technologies.<br /> <br /> '''Anna Mladentseva''' is a PhD researcher at University College London whose project focuses on the conservation of software-based works of art and design from the Victoria &amp; Albert museum.<br /> <br /> '''Shusha Niederberger''' is a PhD researcher based at Zurich University of the Arts and working on user subject positions in datafied environments and aesthetic strategies of using otherwise.<br /> <br /> '''Søren Bro Pold''' Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, works with the arts of the interface and interface criticism.<br /> <br /> '''Winnie Soon''' is a Hong Kong-born artist coder and researcher, engaging with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals and digital censorship.<br /> <br /> '''Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver''' ferments data and investigates Critical Data and related practices through curating. She is Associate Professor in Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University.<br /> <br /> '''Varia''' is a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology. https://varia.zone<br /> <br /> '''Jack Wilson''' is a PhD researcher at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. He is not a conspiracy theorist. <br /> <br /> '''xenodata co-operative''' investigates image politics, algorithmic culture and technological conditions of knowledge production and governance through art and media practices. The collective is run by curator Yasemin Keskintepe and artist-researcher Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina.<br /> <br /> '''Sandy Di Yu''' is a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex and co-managing editor of DiSCo Journal (www.discojournal.com), using digital artist critique to examine shifting experiences of time.<br /> <br /> '''Freja Kir''' is researching across intersections of artistic methods, spatial publishing and digital media environments. Creatively directing fanfare – collective for visual communication. Contributing to stanza – studio for critical publishing. PhD fellow, University of West London.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Contributors&diff=1140 2023-01-20T15:41:46Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>'''Christian Ulrik Andersen''', Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, is attempting to bring the knowledge and practices of digital culture and art to the fore.<br /> <br /> '''Geoff Cox''' is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University, and co-director of Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI).<br /> <br /> '''Camille Crichlow''' is a PhD Researcher at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (University College London). Her research interrogates how the historical and socio-cultural narrative of race manifests in contemporary algorithmic technologies.<br /> <br /> From a network of '''Feminist Servers''' the following authors contributed: mara karagianni - artist, software, sysadmin, ooooo - Transuniversal constellation, nate wessalowski - PhD student at Münster University, vo ezn - sound &amp;&amp; infrastructure artist.<br /> <br /> '''Teodora Sinziana Fartan''' is an artist and PhD researcher at CSNI, London South Bank University. <br /> <br /> '''Susanne Förster''' is a PhD candidate and research associate at the University of Siegen. Her work deals with imaginaries and infrastructures of conversational artificial agents.<br /> <br /> '''Inte Gloerich''' (Utrecht University &amp; Institute of Network Cultures) researches sociotechnical imaginaries around blockchain technology as they appear in for instance memes, startup culture, and art.<br /> <br /> '''Daniel Chávez Heras''' is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing at King's College London. He studies the computational production and analysis of visual culture.<br /> <br /> '''Jung-Ah Kim''' is a PhD researcher in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. She studies the relationship between weaving and computing and traditional Korean textiles.  <br /> <br /> '''Inga Luchs''' is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. In her research, she deals with questions of data classification and discrimination from a cultural and technical perspective.<br /> <br /> '''Gabriel Menotti''' is Associate Professor in Film &amp; Media at Queen's University and an independent curator. <br /> <br /> '''Alasdair Milne''' is a PhD researcher with Serpentine Galleries’ Creative AI Lab and King’s College London. His work focuses on the collaborative systems that emerge around new technologies.<br /> <br /> '''Anna Mladentseva''' is a PhD researcher at University College London whose project focuses on the conservation of software-based works of art and design from the Victoria &amp; Albert museum.<br /> <br /> '''Shusha Niederberger''' is a PhD researcher based at Zurich University of the Arts and working on user subject positions in datafied environments and aesthetic strategies of using otherwise.<br /> <br /> '''Søren Bro Pold''' Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, works with the arts of the interface and interface criticism.<br /> <br /> '''Winnie Soon''' is a Hong Kong-born artist coder and researcher, engaging with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals and digital censorship.<br /> <br /> '''Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver''' ferments data and investigates Critical Data and related practices through curating. She is Associate Professor in Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University.<br /> <br /> '''Varia''' is a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology. https://varia.zone<br /> <br /> '''Jack Wilson''' is a PhD researcher at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. He is not a conspiracy theorist. <br /> <br /> '''xenodata co-operative''' investigates image politics, algorithmic culture and technological conditions of knowledge production and governance through art and media practices. The collective is run by curator Yasemin Keskintepe and artist-researcher Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina.<br /> <br /> '''Sandy Di Yu''' is a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex and co-managing editor of DiSCo Journal (www.discojournal.com), using digital artist critique to examine shifting experiences of time.<br /> <br /> '''Freja Kir''' is researching across intersections of artistic methods, spatial publishing and digital media environments. Creatively directing fanfare – collective for visual communication (NL). Contributing to stanza – studio for critical publishing (DK). PhD fellow, UWL (UK).</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir_500&diff=1127 2023-01-20T15:35:27Z

<p>Freja Kir: /* Misplaced, disrupted, dysfunctional – artistic strategies for reconsidering digital scale */</p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:500 words]]<br /> <br /> == Misplaced, disrupted, dysfunctional – artistic tactics for reconsidering digital scale ==<br /> '''Freja Kir''' <br /> <br /> As the reliance on digital platforms expands, so does the relevance and urgency to develop more diverse critical tools that scrutinise their environments, affordances and in-built relations. This begs for research outside the academic institution to establish the ground for critical dialogue and productive speculations. Relatedly, a tendency emerges across the artistic field to spatialise digital platforms, embody them and critically put them on display. How do scale and situatedness appear and matter across such artworks? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance diverse existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? Without drawing any conclusions, this text devotes particular attention to the spatial parameters presented through the actions of misplaced content, disrupted archives and dysfunctional systems in three diverse artistic examples that explore different spatial configurations (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). <br /> <br /> '''Scene 1: Online''' <br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1).<br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|center|thumb|500x500px|Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December (2022)]]<br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Scene 2: At streetlevel'''<br /> <br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character.<br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|center|thumb|500x500px|Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN are location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the disrupted archives. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). <br /> <br /> '''Scene 3: On sea''' <br /> <br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|center|thumb|500x500px|Figure 3. 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)]]<br /> Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to build the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is protocol dependent, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand simple constructions (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir_500&diff=1100 2023-01-20T15:25:32Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:500 words]]<br /> <br /> == Misplaced, disrupted, dysfunctional – artistic strategies for reconsidering digital scale ==<br /> '''Freja Kir''' <br /> <br /> As the reliance on digital platforms expands, so does the relevance and urgency to develop more diverse critical tools that scrutinise their environments, affordances and in-built relations. This begs for research outside the academic institution to establish the ground for critical dialogue and productive speculations. Relatedly, a tendency emerges across the artistic field to spatialise digital platforms, embody them and critically put them on display. How do scale and situatedness appear and matter across such artworks? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance diverse existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? Without drawing any conclusions, this text devotes particular attention to the spatial parameters presented through the actions of misplaced content, disrupted archives and dysfunctional systems in three diverse artistic examples that explore different spatial configurations (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). <br /> <br /> '''Scene 1: Online''' <br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1).<br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|center|thumb|500x500px|Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December (2022)]]<br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Scene 2: At streetlevel'''<br /> <br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character.<br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|center|thumb|500x500px|Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN are location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the disrupted archives. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). <br /> <br /> '''Scene 3: On sea''' <br /> <br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|center|thumb|500x500px|Figure 3. 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)]]<br /> Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to build the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is protocol dependent, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand simple constructions (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir_500&diff=1082 2023-01-20T15:16:46Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:500 words]]<br /> As the reliance on digital platforms expands, so does the relevance and urgency to develop more diverse critical tools that scrutinise their environments, affordances and in-built relations. This begs for research outside the academic institution to establish the ground for critical dialogue and productive speculations. Relatedly, a tendency emerges across the artistic field to spatialise digital platforms, embody them and critically put them on display. How do scale and situatedness appear and matter across such artworks? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance diverse existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? Without drawing any conclusions, this text devotes particular attention to the spatial parameters presented through the actions of misplaced content, disrupted archives and dysfunctional systems in three diverse artistic examples that explore different spatial configurations (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). <br /> <br /> '''Scene 1: Online''' <br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1).<br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|center|thumb|500x500px|Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December (2022)]]<br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Scene 2: At streetlevel'''<br /> <br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character.<br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|center|thumb|500x500px|Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)]]<br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN are location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the disrupted archives. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). <br /> <br /> '''Scene 3: On sea''' <br /> <br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|center|thumb|500x500px|Figure 3. 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)]]<br /> Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to build the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is protocol dependent, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand simple constructions (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir_500&diff=839 2023-01-20T11:51:29Z

<p>Freja Kir: Created page with &quot; Category:Toward a Minor Tech Category:500 words As the reliance on digital platforms expands, so does the relevance and urgency to develop more diverse critical tools that scrutinise their environments, affordances and in-built relations. This begs for research that reaches outside of the academic institution to establish the ground for critical dialogue and productive speculations. Relatedly, a tendency emerges across the artistic field to spatialise digital pl...&quot;</p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:500 words]]<br /> As the reliance on digital platforms expands, so does the relevance and urgency to develop more diverse critical tools that scrutinise their environments, affordances and in-built relations. This begs for research that reaches outside of the academic institution to establish the ground for critical dialogue and productive speculations. Relatedly, a tendency emerges across the artistic field to spatialise digital platforms, embody them and critically put them on display.  How does scale and situatedness appear and matter across such art works? And (how) do such creative contributions help to critically nuance diverse existing understandings of large-scale digital platforms? Without drawing any conclusions, this writing devote particular attention to the spatial parameters presented through the actions of misplaced content, disrupted archives and dysfunctional systems in three diverse artistic examples.<br /> <br /> Scene 1: Online <br /> <br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. <br /> <br /> Scene 2: At streetlevel<br /> <br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character.<br /> <br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN is location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). <br /> <br /> Scene 3: On sea <br /> <br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> <br /> Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=518 2023-01-09T14:43:47Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies'''<br /> <br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: Online ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: In the street ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Bernhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> &lt;small&gt;Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /> Mentioned art works:&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;[https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;/small&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=513 2023-01-09T11:15:50Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies'''<br /> <br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: Online ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: In the street ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> &lt;small&gt;Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /> Mentioned art works:&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;[https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;/small&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=512 2023-01-09T11:14:26Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies ===<br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: Online ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: In the street ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> &lt;small&gt;Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /> Mentioned art works:&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;[https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;/small&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=511 2023-01-09T11:10:52Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>&lt;!-- -------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------<br /> <br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Leaking_digital_scale&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --&gt;=== Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies ===<br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: Online ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: In the street ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> &lt;small&gt;Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /> Mentioned art works:&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;[https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;/small&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=454 2022-12-20T18:10:46Z

<p>Freja Kir: wording</p> <hr /> <div>&lt;!-- -------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------<br /> <br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> To allow others to comment on the 1000 words version of your text, <br /> we will work with embedded etherpads in the pages here on the wiki.<br /> <br /> To embed an etherpad in your page and allow peer-annotations:<br /> <br /> 1. Change the id=&quot;&quot; value from CHANGEME into an etherpad name of choice. <br /> 2. Scroll down and click &quot;Save page&quot; to save the page. <br /> 3. The etherpad should appear on the right side of the screen.<br /> <br /> NOTE: You cannot use spaces in the id=&quot;&quot; value.<br /> <br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --&gt;=== Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies ===<br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: Online ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: In the street ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> &lt;small&gt;Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /> Mentioned art works:&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;[https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;/small&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=453 2022-12-20T18:08:48Z

<p>Freja Kir: wording</p> <hr /> <div>&lt;!-- -------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------<br /> <br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> To allow others to comment on the 1000 words version of your text, <br /> we will work with embedded etherpads in the pages here on the wiki.<br /> <br /> To embed an etherpad in your page and allow peer-annotations:<br /> <br /> 1. Change the id=&quot;&quot; value from CHANGEME into an etherpad name of choice. <br /> 2. Scroll down and click &quot;Save page&quot; to save the page. <br /> 3. The etherpad should appear on the right side of the screen.<br /> <br /> NOTE: You cannot use spaces in the id=&quot;&quot; value.<br /> <br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --&gt;=== Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies ===<br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: On line ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: In the street ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> &lt;small&gt;Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /> Mentioned art works:&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;[https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;/small&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=452 2022-12-20T18:05:25Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>&lt;!-- -------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------<br /> <br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> To allow others to comment on the 1000 words version of your text, <br /> we will work with embedded etherpads in the pages here on the wiki.<br /> <br /> To embed an etherpad in your page and allow peer-annotations:<br /> <br /> 1. Change the id=&quot;&quot; value from CHANGEME into an etherpad name of choice. <br /> 2. Scroll down and click &quot;Save page&quot; to save the page. <br /> 3. The etherpad should appear on the right side of the screen.<br /> <br /> NOTE: You cannot use spaces in the id=&quot;&quot; value.<br /> <br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --&gt;=== Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies ===<br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: On line ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: At streetlevel ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At the sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> &lt;small&gt;Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /> Mentioned art works:&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;[https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;/small&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=451 2022-12-20T18:04:25Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>&lt;!-- -------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------<br /> <br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Kir&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> To allow others to comment on the 1000 words version of your text, <br /> we will work with embedded etherpads in the pages here on the wiki.<br /> <br /> To embed an etherpad in your page and allow peer-annotations:<br /> <br /> 1. Change the id=&quot;&quot; value from CHANGEME into an etherpad name of choice. <br /> 2. Scroll down and click &quot;Save page&quot; to save the page. <br /> 3. The etherpad should appear on the right side of the screen.<br /> <br /> NOTE: You cannot use spaces in the id=&quot;&quot; value.<br /> <br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --&gt;=== Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies ===<br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: On line ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: At streetlevel ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At the sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> &lt;small&gt;Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /> Mentioned art works:&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;[https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;/small&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=450 2022-12-20T18:02:44Z

<p>Freja Kir: type size</p> <hr /> <div>&lt;!-- -------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------<br /> <br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> To allow others to comment on the 1000 words version of your text, <br /> we will work with embedded etherpads in the pages here on the wiki.<br /> <br /> To embed an etherpad in your page and allow peer-annotations:<br /> <br /> 1. Change the id=&quot;&quot; value from CHANGEME into an etherpad name of choice. <br /> 2. Scroll down and click &quot;Save page&quot; to save the page. <br /> 3. The etherpad should appear on the right side of the screen.<br /> <br /> NOTE: You cannot use spaces in the id=&quot;&quot; value.<br /> <br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --&gt;=== Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies ===<br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: On line ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: At streetlevel ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At the sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> &lt;small&gt;Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44.&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;br /&gt;<br /> Mentioned art works:&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;[https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;/small&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=449 2022-12-20T18:01:56Z

<p>Freja Kir: Image placement</p> <hr /> <div>&lt;!-- -------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------<br /> <br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> To allow others to comment on the 1000 words version of your text, <br /> we will work with embedded etherpads in the pages here on the wiki.<br /> <br /> To embed an etherpad in your page and allow peer-annotations:<br /> <br /> 1. Change the id=&quot;&quot; value from CHANGEME into an etherpad name of choice. <br /> 2. Scroll down and click &quot;Save page&quot; to save the page. <br /> 3. The etherpad should appear on the right side of the screen.<br /> <br /> NOTE: You cannot use spaces in the id=&quot;&quot; value.<br /> <br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --&gt;=== Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies ===<br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: On line ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|500x500px|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> ====== Scene 2: At streetlevel ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|500x500px|alt=Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)|center|thumb|&lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt;]]The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At the sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;|alt=Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)|center|thumb]]Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54 <br /> <br /> Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA<br /> <br /> Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press<br /> <br /> Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44. <br /> <br /> Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press<br /> <br /> Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64<br /> <br /> Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278<br /> <br /> Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press<br /> <br /> Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17 <br /> <br /> <br /> Mentioned art works:<br /> <br /> [https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason<br /> <br /> Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl<br /> <br /> Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl<br /> <br /> PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock <br /> <br /> 100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega<br /> <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=448 2022-12-20T17:57:32Z

<p>Freja Kir: Text added</p> <hr /> <div>&lt;!-- -------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------<br /> <br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> To allow others to comment on the 1000 words version of your text, <br /> we will work with embedded etherpads in the pages here on the wiki.<br /> <br /> To embed an etherpad in your page and allow peer-annotations:<br /> <br /> 1. Change the id=&quot;&quot; value from CHANGEME into an etherpad name of choice. <br /> 2. Scroll down and click &quot;Save page&quot; to save the page. <br /> 3. The etherpad should appear on the right side of the screen.<br /> <br /> NOTE: You cannot use spaces in the id=&quot;&quot; value.<br /> <br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --&gt;=== Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies ===<br /> This writing briefly presents a collection of three artistic scenes unfolding in or around the peripheries of minor tech. With particular attention to the diverse qualities at play, the cases all aim to downscale technology to a graspable level. Regarding the examples as strategies for altering digital scales, I suggest the artworks as productive lenses to critically examine the dimensions of large-scale digital platforms. <br /> <br /> ====== Scene 1: On line ======<br /> A left-aligned list of words is set in a bold black and almost illegible type. These are the names of the artists. Listed underneath are classical blue-lettered hyperlinks. The page contains nothing more than this: names in bold, accompanied by blue plane links (fig 1). <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-15 at 16.43.21.png|alt= Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022|left|frameless|500x500px]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Figure 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> The digital platform Cosmos Carl presents a website and framework with links to artistic initiatives that appropriate existing commercial platform tools. Amongst the works are projects that modify publicly accessible surveillance cameras (Someplace, somewhere 2020) or another that intentionally misuses Airbnb to present infrastructures of lakes in Georgia (Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers)). While internet pages are commonly visited with a purpose and directed according to expectations (Bucher 2017), Cosmos Carl playfully challenges such online navigation. In this writing, Cosmos Carl contributes with an easily accessible example of artistic intentionally misuse of familiar digital tools.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 2: At streetlevel ======<br /> Imagine a locally disrupted online platform: a scattered illustration turns up on a smartphone screen: the circular pattern turns into a globe, then an installation setting, and finally into the shape of a famous cartoon character, all happening along with a twisted interference of sounds and texts. <br /> [[File:VPN.jpg|left|frameless|500x500px]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Figure 2. VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> The scene unfolding describes the features of the emancipatory file server, VPN (Virtual PUB Network) (fig. 2). As an artistic work, VPN served the purpose of mapping and archiving the graduation show of the independent Art and Design university Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). However, whereas archives typically help to create order, the visual interfaces of VPN were location-dependent and coded to intentionally disrupt the user's scroll. When introducing VPN, what is of interest is not so much the content but the physically dependent disruption. VPN presents how an interdisciplinary systematic creative strategy may provoke interaction between artists, audience, and spatial surroundings (Bhowmik &amp; Parikka 2021). In extension to the previous example, VPN presents a locally dependent model of misplaced content, disrupted archives, and dysfunctional systems.<br /> <br /> ====== Scene 3: At the sea ======<br /> From a mesh of online strategic misusage to locally intended server disruption, the final scene brings us onto the hyper-local solar panel-powered floating context of the art collective 100 Rabbits. <br /> [[File:Screenshot 2022-12-09 at 16.57.50.png|left|frameless|500x500px|&lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Figure 3. Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> Living, working, and DIY making minor tech tools from their sailboat at open sea, the setup of 100 Rabbits includes everything from generating the power they need to building the programmes they use (drawing, writing, editing, archiving, coding) (Fig. 3). While the programmes developed by 100 Rabbits stand out in a minor tech context, it is with interest in how limitations of access and space are reflected in the works by 100 rabbits. When at sea, bandwidth is limited, electricity scarce, and access to information is dependent on the protocols brought along, effectively the tools and programmes by 100 Rabbits demand logical build-ups (to be disassembled, reassembled, and repaired) (Latour 1994). In this writing, 100 Rabbits bring an inquiry into digital tools, the energy consumed, and the access demanded by commercial digital services. With the two former cases in mind, 100 Rabbits presents a hyper-local scale of how consequences of connectivity limitations and power consumption materialise into creative DIY solutions.<br /> <br /> ====== Across scale ======<br /> From walking and reading to sailing and scrolling, the cases present different qualities of artistic approaches that intentionally are made material, leap into space, or extend out of their digital native sphere. This orientation provides us with a selection of works that expose the processes of known and lesser-known online tools. Through this optic the artistic cases bring forth different strategies to reflect digital scales vertically (Manovich 2012). Here, the concept of scale draws on architectural traditions for systemising space, exemplified by media scholar Berhard Siegert by tracing the development of the three-dimensional grid as an introduction to visual megastructures. Sociology and design scholar Benjamin Bratton further explores visual megastructures by presenting the Stack as a metaphor for digital scale (Bratton 2015). While one should read into this with a critical eye, turning to the example by Bratton exemplifies the complexities brought along in the attempt to comprehend digital scales. <br /> <br /> The examples presented in this writing introduce how procedures of twisting or reproducing functions of digital tools may visually or physically reveal the intentions of computational functions and their interfaces (Berlant 2016; Stanfill 2015). Such processes likewise reflect how the language and code of corporate digital platforms could be challenged through activistic and artistic subversions (Cramer &amp; Fuller 2007). The examples were specifically brought together to consider how artistic works can be approached in relation to minor tech solutions and provoke a critical understanding of digital structures. <br /> <br /> While many different analytical directions could spring from this point of view, I specifically situate the works into questions of scale in an artistic minor tech context: What may we learn from looking to artistic practices and visualisations concerned with minor tech? And (how) do such creative contributions help to nuance diverse existing understandings of digital platforms? How can we situate artistic platform appropriation as a strategy to critically understand large-scale digital platforms?<br /> <br /> === Colophon ===<br /> Bhowmik, S. &amp; Parikka, J. (2021). Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method, Leonardo Journal MIT press, vol 54 <br /> <br /> Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, University of Chicago, USA<br /> <br /> Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press<br /> <br /> Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms. Information, Communication &amp; Society 20(1), 30-44. <br /> <br /> Cramer, F. and Fuller, M. Interface, in Fuller, M. (2007). (Ed.), Software Lexicon, MIT Press<br /> <br /> Latour, B. (1994): On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy in Common Knowledge, Vol 3, Issue 2, 29-64<br /> <br /> Manovich, L. (2012). How to compare one million images? in Berry, D. (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 249–278<br /> <br /> Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York: Fordham University Press<br /> <br /> Stanfill, M. (2015). The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design, new media &amp; society 2015, Vol. 17 <br /> <br /> <br /> Mentioned art works:<br /> <br /> [https://www.cosmoscarl.com/ Cosmos Carl], by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason<br /> <br /> Petits Filous (26,000 Rivers), Josephine Callaghan, hosted on Airbnb, linked at Cosmos Carl<br /> <br /> Someplace, somewhere, Steinunn Önnudóttir, hosted on My Earth Cam, linked at Cosmos Carl<br /> <br /> PUB VPN Network by Agustina Woodgate, Miquel Hervas Gomez, Sascha Krischock <br /> <br /> 100 Rabbits by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega<br /> <br /> Thanks to Rapahel Bastide for inspiration, to Frederique Pisuisse for Cosmos Carl insights and to PUB VPN for sharing their build instructions made in collaboration with LAG lab for VPN&lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:Screenshot_2022-12-09_at_16.57.50.png&diff=447 2022-12-20T17:55:30Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Fig 3, Screenshot, 100 Rabbits keynote presentation, Software Doldrums, LibrePlanet (2022)</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:VPN.jpg&diff=446 2022-12-20T17:51:44Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Figure 2, VPN Network map, VPN app screenshot, VPN Node at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Photo: Agustina Woodgate (2019)</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=File:Screenshot_2022-12-15_at_16.43.21.png&diff=445 2022-12-20T17:43:51Z

<p>Freja Kir: </p> <hr /> <div>Fig 1. Entrance page of Cosmos Carl, screenshot: December 2022</div>

Freja Kir http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Kir&diff=444 2022-12-20T17:38:21Z

<p>Freja Kir: Created page with &quot;&lt;!-- ------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------ &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt; To allow others to comment on the 1000 words version of your text, we will work with embedded etherpads in the pages here on the wiki. To embed an etherpad in your page and allow peer-annotations: 1. Change the...&quot;</p> <hr /> <div>&lt;!-- -------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> --------------------------peer-annotations------------------------------<br /> <br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;Leaking digital scale – a trio of artistic strategies&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> To allow others to comment on the 1000 words version of your text, <br /> we will work with embedded etherpads in the pages here on the wiki.<br /> <br /> To embed an etherpad in your page and allow peer-annotations:<br /> <br /> 1. Change the id=&quot;&quot; value from CHANGEME into an etherpad name of choice. <br /> 2. Scroll down and click &quot;Save page&quot; to save the page. <br /> 3. The etherpad should appear on the right side of the screen.<br /> <br /> NOTE: You cannot use spaces in the id=&quot;&quot; value.<br /> <br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --&gt;<br /> &lt;div class=&quot;pad&quot;&gt;&lt;eplite id=&quot;CHANGEME&quot; show-chat=&quot;false&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

Freja Kir