Page 245 - The Black Box Book

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