Page 244 - The Black Box Book

Among Tega Brain’s earliest artworks, based in environmental
engineering and examination of issues of ecology, data systems and in-
frastructure is Coin-Operated Wetland (2011, 2021). A people operated
laundromat with closed water circuit built in a gallery consists of a soil
and plant purification system for wastewater to return clean water back
to washing machine.
“We could only do one load per day because that’s the pace at which
the plants could consume the water. But if we’re going to shift away
from seeing ecosystems strictly as service providers and towards
a more negotiated, reciprocal relationship with them, our systems
are going to need a little more give.” (Brain, 2019)
Preservation and conservation projects should not be limited to
technological structures and formal features of the artwork. At the sym-
posium Contemporary Art Conservation Revisited: 20 years later,
held in 2022 at the Bern Academy of the Arts (Haidvogl et al., 2022),
Coline Ardouin presented paper on the topic of managing and car-
ing for living plants that are part of an art installation in a museum
setting, which requires cooperation with experts from different fields,
such as biology or botany. Example of such curatorial practice can be
the Beuys’ Acorns (2007–2025). Re-enacting project of Heather Ackroyd
and Dan Harvey involved trees grown from acorns collected from Joseph
Beuys’ 7000 Oaks (7000 Eichen, 1982–1986) social sculpture. In this
landmark artwork, by putting oak trees and other tree species in public lo-
cations, Beuys hoped to transform Kassel from the “city of administration”
to the “city of trees”. A basalt column was to be buried in the earth adja-
cent to each tree. Organizationally and financially ambitious project was
launched in 1982 as part of the Documenta 7 exhibition by transporting all
the columns to the park, where they were assembled into an enormous
sculpture. The basalt mass and consequent planting was met with disfa-
vors and obstacles. Planting carried on by number of people and groups
for several years, until finally the material sculpture disappeared, turning
into the invisible ‘social sculpture’. While Beuys’ artistic vision was to trans-
form consciousness so that the biosphere, as a healthy, biological and
essential atmosphere, would be consistent with human and multi-species
needs, the reiteration of this ecological project, The Beuys’ Acorns took
form of a tour with discussions of these topics through French cities in
advance of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris in
2016, and continued through various institutions across United Kingdom.
The saplings have acted as both artwork and catalyst for a public dis-
cussion on climate change carried out in galleries and exhibitions. In
2021, artists Ackroyd & Harvey have installed Beuys’ Acorns, a group of
100 oak trees, on Tate Modern’s South Terrace. The trees were exhibited
at Tate Modern in London and as part of Beuys’ legacy, seven of the oak
saplings were permanently planted in the local area. The artists aim to
plant the remaining trees by 2025. (Tate Modern, 2021)
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ART OF DIGITAL COMMUNITIES AND
OPEN PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURES
In 2010, in a lecture Freedom in the Cloud, held for the Internet
Society New York, Eben Moglen recapitulated the development of net-
works, from the original ideas of all peers on the same level, changing
gradually to omnipotent servers in the cloud and surveilled ‘users’ under
the secretive economy of data mining. He called it the architecture of
disaster. An increasing concentration of power has emerged without any
discussion of the long-term social consequences. The asymmetry between
thin clients against strengthening servers also means the increasing
impotency of people who own the client devices. Only the music that
the monopoly music publisher permits can be played on a phone. It’s not
what one wants to listen to, but what is in the majority economic interest
of the publishers to be listened to. It is no longer the case of software
companies, but management of platform business models. (Moglen, 2010)
The lecture happened to be the starting point leading to the development
of public social networks, critique of using the word ‘user’ for humans and
Moglen’s idea of small internet device, a personal mobile server, having all
the apps to facilitate the communication among people, called Freedom
Box, became a reality ten years later.
Moglen’s lecture inspired four students of New York University
to start a crowdfunding campaign. At the end of 2010, they released
the first version of diaspora*, which was to replace Facebook with a de-
centralized network, sponsored by a public institution and not owned by
anyone. Diaspora was a media sensation before a line of code was written.
The youth, inexperience, high expectations, and bugs of the first version
left an indelible mark on the project and later would sink further huge
difficulties. As a ‘startup’, it failed, but the community prevailed and today
it is second largest open social network.
In decentralized social networks, there is no one central website.
There is many of them, with different names, with different individual
or organizational providers. These nodes create a connected network
by using a common protocol, based on standardized message types,
understandable to all nodes. If it sounds faintly familiar, that’s exactly how
internet was designed to work.
Based on the StatusNet software and the OStatus protocol, identi.ca
(2008-) was maybe the first node of the independent social network.
It was mostly concerned with the free software community. As an ex-
tension of the RSS/Atom web publishing protocol, which is still widely
used for podcasts, Evan Podromou standardized Ostatus in 2010. With
a reader app for RSS or a podcast, anyone can collect interesting news
from various internet places by subscribing without needing to visit each
site again and again. However, RSS does not allow for comments, shar-
ing, or interaction, which is why events and their actors were included as
an extension. Evan Podromou continued his work on various social projects
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