A virtual residency

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The open call of Radical Openess appeals bolwerK:

http://www.ooooo.be

• bolwerK is a non-exclusive and temporal constellation  that has been initiating, mediating, facilitating, curating and  appropriating local and  international projects since 1998. Its 'open'  network is the basis for collaboration on relevant issues. Social environments are created, not  for streamlining ideas, but in order to  formulate shared/common questions and hence feed a sense of  communality.  'Open source' is a  philosophy not a pragmatic methodology  to expand these questions into practice. For the past ten years  bolwerK exist in between arts and culture agents, socio-cultural  organizations, alternative initiatives and a growing  potential of active thinkers, artists and citizens.

In the late ninties, I opted for bolwerK first web-presence for an independent server network, [http://www.all2all.org|all2all.org]. Although only later we realized we didn't have any commandline access. I used to write html, and installing different content mangement systems: ftp was the protocol. When I started to collaborate with Wendy van Wynsberghe on [http://cik.constantvzw.org/home.php?lng=en| Cuisine Interne], a websoftware, developed  by constantvzw,  for recording and archiving interviews on the internal kitchen of programmers, artist, performers,  ...  was prompted with ssh and virtual machines.  

At that  time I also interviewed Ushi Reiter, during an /ETC, eclectictechcarnival in Amsterdam where she introduced me to servus.at, mur.at,...and the politics of the autonomous network in the digital age. Access to servers and virtual spaces gained importance in bolwerK's radius of activities and practices. I started using Linux, Ubuntu to debian and switched from Gnome to Ion. 

[img:http://ooooo.be/dept_shadows~waves/g_virtual/dept_shadow003.jpg|420]

Last year I  did job shadowing at mur.at  to introduce me in the daily tasks of an independent data center. Parallel, bolwerk started the Department of Shadow and waves which examines the physical and socio-political impact of electromagnetic  fields and declares open access to physical and virtual resources as  servers, buildings, antenna's, air and frequencies.
http://ooooo.be/dept_shadows~waves/

[img:http://ooooo.be/dept_shadows~waves/a_virtual/a-virtual000.jpg | 420]

For the project we started to collaborate closer with the local mesh network Wireless Antwerpen. We have an antenna on the rooftop of [http://www.ooooo.be/S14|S14] They also provide us with a virtual machine which hosts [http://www.ooooo.be/ruelles| RadioRuelles]: liquid soap, radio manager software with live stream. [img:https://hackerspace.be/smw/images/0/02/Rec-arch.png|420]

They are flexible and super supportive but we have no garantuee as we depend on the goodwill of 1 person and we don't pay .... It is precarious but feeds an alternative economy of exchange of tactics, strategies and infrastructure.

[img:http://www.ooooo.be/daemonsshellscripts/ds-interface.png | 420]

The last 3 months bolwerK was developped Daemons & Shell Scripts in collboration with MHKA & AIR Antwerpen, we setup a public performative interface, a discursive platform and a temporary laboratory to experiment to DIWO,  do it with others. During this period we had several events (Shell  Scripts). Wireless Antwerpen provide us with antenna's and security camera's and server space. Three  locations where linked by the local nodes and we remotely could access 3  raspberry pi's for streaming/recording (gstreamer) + Tiny Controller  with an IR sensor which triggered a computer with a text script or a  software module for SSTV, connected to a transceiver with cat interface. There was also a pole dancing platform, a boxing bag and a holocube. By  practice we triggered different audiovirtual presences and our physical  body. For the first time I was interacting and controlling machines via commandline ssh, without webinterfacing.
http://ooooo.be/daemonsshellscripts/

I also became sysadmin of anarchaserver.org, an autonomous feminist server  which aim is to develop autonomous infrastructure on the Internet for  feminists projects.  I installed mediawiki, wordpress multi-site, and granted people access. Now  we have to focus on backup and maintenace.
http://anarchaserver.org/



For the residency we propose: A MERGE - MIGRATION TEST 

To log and research the process of migrating. 

What does it mean to move for political reasons to another data center? Can we speak of digital asylum and on which premises is bolwerK allowed to exist in this new digital territory ?
What practical , technical and administrative implication does a migration process encompass? Will we be able to integrate in this new digital territory/community ? 

- ooooo.be  (all2all) www.oooooo.be
- radio streamer ( wireless antwerpen) http://188.210.92.35/
- backup (mirror, anarchaserver.org) http://anarchaserver.org/

• aug sept : check and revisit data, cleanup the archives
• beginning oktober: start migration
• mid oktober: improve radio streamer by making archive accessible
• end oktober: finish migration
• november: make a performative event on digital migration as a political tool. 

In  the next months, we will work on distributed networks during THF, we  will join Hacking with care @ccc in Berlin, we are invited in Promiscue Pipelines and would love to have a virtual residency @servus.at  in the meantime.



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Marthe Van Dessel is an activist and performer who  creates interfaces, devices &  protocols to instigate our urban and  institutional hardware. She engages in the administrative, cultural, political dimension of personal and collective identities. By triggering intersubjective alliances she confronts the 'self &  other' to the commons, co-authorship and the redistribution into the  public domain.

Pieter Heremans  is an excavator of digital artefacts and skipper wannabe. He facilitated the hackerspace Brussels  in void*ptr (voidpointer, a space for untyped,  Currently he is involved in the Experimental  Media Research group at St-Lukas Antwerp.