Bibliotecha
Summary
Bibliotecha is an offline digital library, developed by students of the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. It is a framework to facilitate the local distribution of digital publications within a small community. It relies on a microcomputer running open-source software to serve books over a local wifi hotspot. Using the browser to connect to the library one can retrieve or donate texts. Bibliotecha proposes an alternative model of distribution of digital texts that allows specific communities to form and share their own collections. Since its presentation at “Are You Being Served?” a series of domino events followed… Bibliotecha has started living a life on its own!
Lire + écrire
Bibliotecha featured on the cover of Lire + Écrire <http://publie.net/livre/lireecrire/>, edited by Catherine Lenoble and Guénaël Boutouillet and published by Région des Pays de la Loire and publie.net. This publication is a cookbook, which shares practical “recipes” from designers’, artists’, researchers’ and librarians’ perspectives, reflecting on alternative methods of e-publishing.
Post-Digital Publishing Archive
Bibliotecha took part in P-DPA <http://p-dpa.net/work/bibliotecha>, an online archive compiled by Silvio Lorusso, as part of his ongoing investigation on digital and post-digital publication and distribution of digital books.
Art Meets Radical Openness
The project was also present at the conference Art Meets Radical Openness <http://radical-openness.org/programm/2014/bibliotecha-labArts> at the end of May 2014 in Linz, Austria. For the entirety of the festival Bibliotecha served books from a plinth in the exhibition and hosted a workshop. The aim of the workshop was to invite the participants to create Bibliotecha software images from scratch. The underlying goal was to introduce the project to the participants on its different levels: the design, concept and public accessibility. Nevertheless it was time for an install party! In order to test, complete, edit and question the installation manual we’ve been compiling since the beginning of the project.
Unitary Networking
Summary
Combining OpenWRT, Unitary Urbanism, TP-LINK routers, Silicone, Maizena, Gouache, 9V Batteries, Fake Rock Solar Panels as its unlikely ingredients, Unitary Networking looks at the relationship between power and infrastructures, how to challenge hierarchies in networks, how to release devices from their round-cornered black-box, and how to flood USB ports with silicone caulk.
<http://radical-openness.org/programm/2014/unitary-networking>
29/05/2014
Hello *,
after today’s chaotic presentation, we will continue tomorrow with the practical part of the workshop.
Tomorrow we want to start by changing the form of the devices that we use to break their normality. With sylicon!
We have extra routers, so you can either borrow one for the workshop or buy one from us. After that, depending on the interest by the participants, we can look together at the software and installation part, and/or continue the discussion on the topics that we roughly approached today.
For testing the network, we decided to ask the participants (YOU) to keep one of the devices for the last days of the festival. This way the collection of messages will become a sort of collective journal of the carriers of the network. So basically what we ask is to keep one of the nodes with you and try to keep it on as much as possible. And obviously use it in the way you prefer to share thoughts in written form. Everytime the devices meet they will exchange the messages, we hope at least that part of the story got through…
At 17h30 there is going to be a collective walk leaving from AFO, so that will be the end of the workshop. We have batteries though, so we can bring the nodes with us during the walk…
See you tomorrow!
M
06/05/2014
Hey,
Travelled back from Linz Saturday with sticky Meshenger kit. Carefully unpacked and left it alone until today… you noticed too probably: the pink lumpy stuff (on the TP-LINK in my case) never dried. It kept leaking into micro-USB and USB slots, so did not risk plugging anything in. Today decided to clean the pink off —which more or less worked. Plugged in power and USB; TP-LINK starts up and becomes visible as a network device but cannot connect to it. USB-stick seems ok but might be the USB-port got damaged/plugged with pink stuff after all? How do I check?
Your devoted unitary networker,
F
12/09/2014
Hi Michaela,
I’m quite busy at the moment but M took care of documenting the Unitary Networking workshop.
Maybe it’s also interesting to add that “Are You Being Served?” was a direct reason for me to self-host roelof.info, which runs my portfolio website and some services like jabber, IRC, etc. It’s run from home, on an olimex (first seen one at V/J14).
:-)
Hope all is well!
R
2084: Rise of the Botnet
For the second edition of Relearn Summerschool <http://relearn.be> in Constant Variable (June 2014), Anne Laforet, An Mertens, Michael Murtaugh, Michel Cleempoel and Natacha Roussel proposed the worksession “2084: Rise of the Botnet” <http://note.pad.constantvzw.org:8000/1108>.
In many ways, this worksession continued themes and ideas developed during “Are You Being Served?”:
“After the decay of Google and the deprecation of the Web 2.0 darknet, the web is reconstructed using the sustainable IRC protocol. In place of the burned-out centralized data centers created at the turn of the century, software in this new network is deployed as lightweight interrogable bots in ad-hoc mesh networks composed by hacked Pirateboxes and are rewritten and mutated as needed. Different bots crawl the different archives (Google, Gitorious…) and publish parts of conversation in different spaces (Etherpad, wiki…). The result is a social space for writing (software, fiction, documentation) and file-sharing where software and services are as verbose as the participants.”
Department of Shadows and Waves
With ESC, S14, mur.at, Johanna Kirsch and Marthe Van Dessel, bolwerK continued to work on exploring open access into physical and virtual resources as servers, buildings, antennas, air and frequencies.
<http://ooooo.be/dept_shadows~waves>
“Department of Shadows & Waves examines the physical and socio-political impact of electromagnetic fields. From 23–27 of September Marthe Van Dessel, will be (cyber)shadowing mur.at to gain competencies in installing and maintaining servers, setting up access points and of course create radiodramas (virtual). (physical). Johanna Kirsch will join the Department with her tools, practice and interest in existing norms, rules, boundaries and categories; to experiment.”
The Department of Shadows and Waves could be an Afterlife connected to three interventions: “Home is My Server”, “Virtual Tour by all2all”
and “Boxes–Doosjes–Boîtes”.