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Autonomy becomes the illusion made possible by a second layer (or infinite
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The server we set up was just that: a black mythological object capable of
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At the same time, with its mass of tangled cables, it is an object to hide in a
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Experiencing music is an extremely intimate act because the sense of distance,
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Thinking about the relation between autonomy and contingency as an interplay
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The subject, embodying the music, has the power to set their own experience
deciding where to put their boundaries. Subjectivity becomes the meter to
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In the computer world subjectivity works in the same way embodying the whole
conception of the hardware-software dualism and reflecting its own condition of
'being a mind inside a body' in the software. The power of autonomy and
contingency as an interplay enhancing freedom becomes a way to re-read the
meaning of setting up a server and being autonomous in the web. A way to shape
our subjectivity in a world that reflects our inner being and gives us the
possibility to create a parallel place where our intimacy is projected,
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Thinking about the relation between autonomy and contingency as an interplay
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The subject, embodying the music, has the power to set their own experience
deciding where to put their boundaries. Subjectivity becomes the meter to
define freedom, against a pre-determinate thought and a 0-1 solution.
In the computer world subjectivity works in the same way embodying the whole
conception of the hardware-software dualism and reflecting its own condition of
'being a mind inside a body' in the software. The power of autonomy and
contingency as an interplay enhancing freedom becomes a way to re-read the
meaning of setting up a server and being autonomous in the web. A way to shape
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var hacbe = L.divIcon({ className:"subsub", html:'So, we were riding our bikes to my place, the last one of the Infrastructour.
Pedro and Rita couldn't self-host their servers and their house is near mine.
The idea was to set them up all together, connected to my router.
Once inside, it was easy to find my router; too easy. From the ground floor,
exactly on the left side of the entrance, one can find the ethernet plug; from
there I installed a long cable which runs along the side of the first flight of
stairs, arriving at the first floor where it enters through the door of my
apartment. The ethernet cable again sneaks snakily up the second flight of
stairs arriving on the second floor, passing the corridor and entering into the
main room where it finishes its two-floor journey to rest in the socket of my
router. We all followed this cable until its end and we started the process of
installing the servers. While Rita and I were using a Raspberry Pi as hardware
for our server, Pedro was using another machine labelled TIZEN SUNXI ALLWINNER
A20. He didn't have the possibility to set it up through SSH and he needed a
screen to connect his hardware via an HDMI cable, plus a mouse and a keyboard.
Fortunately, I had all he needed and we were positive on the success of these
last server configurations because my router was the same as Simon's, so we
already knew how to set it up and manage the port forwarding process. However,
after a while we noticed Rita's machine wasn't recognised on the home page of
the router (192.168.1.1), where you can check the connected devices and their
respective IPs. The physical router went from being a nice looking and clean
object, with a cable for the power and the snakey Ethernet cable, to resembling
a nest of connected objects with multiple lights and colors. I had a power
strip because I knew there was only one plug, and we needed another three to
supply the power to our machines. My idea was to hide that nest in a box but
actually it is still there. To find out what was the problem with Rita's server
we entered inside the tangled object with our eyes and our hands, and after we
checked the connections we realized two of the five plugs for Ethernet cables
(one was already taken by the two-storey long cable which enable the connection
in the web) were labeled as TV while the other two where labeled as Internet,
and that meant only two of the three servers could have been set.
Rita had to give up having her server hosted at my place and decided to set it
up at Artemis' instead. Apart from this problem related to the difference
between routers, the day ended well. Some went home, others continued the tour
in a pub with a beer, but this experience with technical problems and new
techie terms was the beginning of an ongoing process in discovering the
material and the digital aspects of a network that comprises hardware, software
and physical dependencies. We started to understand how difficult it is to
comprehend the complexity of it all. Even if the intention is to have something
independent, we understood that independence requires a knowledge which is both
technical and situated. In such circumstances one needs a teacher. There is not
only the knowledge of how it works, but also the practical knowledge of how
things work in particular circumstances. This was the starting point for my
thoughts on autonomy and contingency. The idea of having your autonomy on the
web – in our case through a server which is 'ours' – is always related to these
particular conditions and to the fact that you need to operate hardware and
software that will facilitate it... one has to balance the two different worlds
(autonomy vs contingency) and yet the notion of autonomy is based on both;
knowing terms and physical structures, protocols and how to apply them by
opening ports.
We can find a similarity between hosting a server and being hosts in our house;
just as there are protocols in software there are protocols within homes, to
open ports is to open doors. If one is only a client, one is homeless, or a
guest in someone else's house; on the other hand, if one has their own server,
one becomes a host. Things that are normally separated come together.
The distances collapse. This process is a passage from client to client-server.
Infrastructures are one of the most hiding aspects of the architectures of
our society. Their hidden/hiding nature create a magical aura around them. A double
disappearance, from the outside and in the inside, which in part reflect the
debate around the 'black-box' and transforming the concept of infrastructure in
the unknown object hidden inside the box which is a black-box in itself.
Autonomy becomes the illusion made possible by a second layer (or infinite
layering) posed on a physical object, by the tangled complexity of a circuit or
network which forces us to reinvent those concepts in mythological ways.
The server we set up was just that: a black mythological object capable of
hiding worlds, both its physical content, a raspberry pi, and its software.
At the same time, with its mass of tangled cables, it is an object to hide in a
corner of a house. I still forget that have it there, attached to my modem, and
at the same time every day I connect to it through my computer.
Experiencing music is an extremely intimate act because the sense of distance,
typical of visual art, is collapsed in an immediate sense of embodiment.
Thinking about the relation between autonomy and contingency as an interplay
where the subject is posed in a 'liminal' zone opens a new perspective.
The subject, embodying the music, has the power to set their own experience
deciding where to put their boundaries. Subjectivity becomes the meter to
define freedom, against a pre-determinate thought and a 0-1 solution.
In the computer world subjectivity works in the same way embodying the whole
conception of the hardware-software dualism and reflecting its own condition of
'being a mind inside a body' in the software. The power of autonomy and
contingency as an interplay enhancing freedom becomes a way to re-read the
meaning of setting up a server and being autonomous in the web. A way to shape
our subjectivity in a world that reflects our inner being and gives us the
possibility to create a parallel place where our intimacy is projected,
represented and owned.
Setting up a server is a quick and smart way to gain a certain level of
autonomy in the web. Quick because it gives you the possibility to own the
place in which your projects are hosted. Smart because it opens the doors to
acquire knowledges on how the web works. This DYI attitude reflects the hacker
mindset of being independent and autonomous questioning the role of mainstream
and mass-media circuits, while revealing a practical alternative. Learning
computer networks is not only a technical exercise but actually can be
considered as a political act questioning the role of internet in our society
and the ideologies involved in develop the computer itself. It shows how the
building blocks of the web and computer networks are based on physical objects
disrupting the idea of internet as a nowhere cloud in the air.
However setting up a server require technical skills in both hardware and
software's side plus a knowledge of how the web works. Without those expertise
it is very difficult to proceed alone. Sharing this knowledge and skills, and
make a community to provide it, become an essential point in building autonomy,
but an autonomy built on dependencies.
When your home becomes your server, you realize that hosting people in real
life is the same as allowing people to enter inside your server. Open the door
becomes to open your HTTP ports, and rotocols are a series of allowed
behaviours, and of course, as the owner, you can do whatever you want in your
house. When someone is weaving in internet, is connecting as a client to
someone else’s house, but if you own a server you are both a client and a host.
The relation existing between you and your home allows to have a fixed place,
gaining an higher level of autonomy and the possibility to invite people
at yours.
But a server is not always an object in a fixed space and more than one person
needed a moving one. Who for the necessity to live on a boat, who to question
the relation between a person and his/her body, showing how a server can move
with you. Those examples are fascinating not only as they question the standard
fixed location of the server, but also because they are strictly related to an
inquiry on the meaning of home, as a moving house, and subjectivity, as an
embodied one.
The Internet is not any more the wild wide web meant to improve our lives and
increase democratic ideas but has become a worldwide weapon of control and
exploitation. Nowadays the hegemonic centralization is ruling on several layers.
When surfing was a free flow of motion, a matter of following rings made of links
and explore unknown islands, the selection of Google search based on sponsored and
indexed lands, replaced a shared equality with a mainstream selection of contents
making possible the rise of a top class web. Where web's communication was an
astonishing step in the cyberspace capable to connect the globe in shared-time and
an experience to shape through communities, Facebook and its empire of
communication systems is not only killing the value of the communal experience,
enclosing users in a prison called profile, but also stealing information to those
users by presenting them as second class data called metadata. Stolen data which
are sold and used strategically to program behaviour while being hidden to the
public and the academic world researches.
This narrative of the transformation of the web, from a place of freedom to one of
control, resumed in the nowadays role of centralizing corporations and the raise
of a metadata society, is a debate existing before internet itslef and reflecting
the more general issues of the computer world and the machine. This short and
oversimplification actually is far well wider and radiates its querying from
technical to philosophical aspects, from social to existential experiences,
without never forgetting the political view.
How can we escape from systematic control?
How can we build our ideal experience and media?
This way of thinking is intrinsic to the Experimental Publishing course at Piet
Zwart Institute, and the way of exploring solutions and alternatives floats from a
pure interest in experimentation to a more politically involved counter-reaction.
The hacker attitude become the way, and how computers and their software has been
shaped, with the struggles and fights of the early pioneers, became the lens
through which depict today's issues and examples of how to acquire the skills to
reinvent a vanishing future.
Actually the alternative dwells in the potential of the computer itself, a power
that has been hidden during building the blocks of its structure. As Ted Nelsons
points in all his career, the process of building technologies is a political one
made of fights and interests, and not a 'natural' process. What we
see of a computer, its hardware and software, are products of individuals which
developed projects based on certain ideologies. I'll talk later about ideology
but basically this means two things: on the one hand everyone can challenge the
existing structures of power because they are not the only one possible (rather
being usually mediated by a capitalist interest in profit and exclusion). On the other
hand ideally everyone, as individuals capable of critical thought, can build their
own world against the actual shared feeling of impossibility to react, freezing
thought in a constant nihilism and resumed both in Mark Fisher's life experience
and thought, with his book 'Capitalist Realism' (2011) and his recent suicide in
2017.
The economical interest behind the computer's world putted the inexpert user as
meter of judgment and means of profit imposing a well looking interface while
hiding and closing the potential of this media in a black box. This political
process of programmed disappearance has facilitate the immediate usage but raised
the standard computer's interface as the only way possible, banning the knowledge
of the code and erasing the idea of being able to develop another way.
What hacker mindset helps us to see, is not a mythological world fighting between
good or bad behaviours, usually idealized in the meaning of the hacker itself
within a science-fiction narrative made of white and black hats, but a world made
of physical structures and infrastructures made by people and their communities
sharing knowledges. Experiencing the 'develop your way' is intended as an
experimentation free from profit, an interest in challenge yourself from a point
of view where the possibilities are open and everything thinkable becomes
interesting. Behind this view there is a deep and disrupting idea embodying the
power to react in the enthusiasm in experimentation, capable to breaks the black
walls of the box, and finding an object which contains something inherently
different from the Pandora's box.
What is the content of this box?
The possibility to create a world not yet written and within reach. The exploding
actuality of the dreamed post-mass-media era where the hegemonic power comes from
the disruption of illusions and not vice-versa.
A reality that is being shaped in the Experimental Publishing course at Piet Zwart
Institute and surely, if not as a full program, in many other approaches within
communities and in the academic world.
Experiencing music is an extremely intimate act because the sense of distance,
typical of visual art, is collapsed in an immediate sense of embodiment.
Thinking about the relation between autonomy and contingency as an interplay
where the subject is posed in a 'liminal' zone opens a new perspective.
The subject, embodying the music, has the power to set their own experience
deciding where to put their boundaries. Subjectivity becomes the meter to
define freedom, against a pre-determinate thought and a 0-1 solution.
In the computer world subjectivity works in the same way embodying the whole
conception of the hardware-software dualism and reflecting its own condition of
'being a mind inside a body' in the software. The power of autonomy and
contingency as an interplay enhancing freedom becomes a way to re-read the
meaning of setting up a server and being autonomous in the web. A way to shape
our subjectivity in a world that reflects our inner being and gives us the
possibility to create a parallel place where our intimacy is projected,
represented and owned.
Experiencing music is an extremely intimate act because the sense of distance,
typical of visual art, is collapsed in an immediate sense of embodiment.
Thinking about the relation between autonomy and contingency as an interplay
where the subject is posed in a 'liminal' zone opens a new perspective.
The subject, embodying the music, has the power to set their own experience
deciding where to put their boundaries. Subjectivity becomes the meter to
define freedom, against a pre-determinate thought and a 0-1 solution.
In the computer world subjectivity works in the same way embodying the whole
conception of the hardware-software dualism and reflecting its own condition of
'being a mind inside a body' in the software. The power of autonomy and
contingency as an interplay enhancing freedom becomes a way to re-read the
meaning of setting up a server and being autonomous in the web. A way to shape
our subjectivity in a world that reflects our inner being and gives us the
possibility to create a parallel place where our intimacy is projected,
represented and owned.
Experiencing music is an extremely intimate act because the sense of distance,
typical of visual art, is collapsed in an immediate sense of embodiment.
Thinking about the relation between autonomy and contingency as an interplay
where the subject is posed in a 'liminal' zone opens a new perspective.
The subject, embodying the music, has the power to set their own experience
deciding where to put their boundaries. Subjectivity becomes the meter to
define freedom, against a pre-determinate thought and a 0-1 solution.
In the computer world subjectivity works in the same way embodying the whole
conception of the hardware-software dualism and reflecting its own condition of
'being a mind inside a body' in the software. The power of autonomy and
contingency as an interplay enhancing freedom becomes a way to re-read the
meaning of setting up a server and being autonomous in the web. A way to shape
our subjectivity in a world that reflects our inner being and gives us the
possibility to create a parallel place where our intimacy is projected,
represented and owned.