The digital is not “immaterial”; rather, it's entangled with the planet in many ways. Our immediate interest lies in the world that opens up when we treat technological, social, and ecological factors equally. What artistic strategies can create such relations, and what kind of aesthetics can make such a world accessible? In a first step, we set up two servers within the solar protocol, a distributed network of servers that reconfigures itself in real-time based on the availability of sunlight. In a second step, we will explore the protocol as a space for artistic agency.
The project has two aims. First to contribute to the expansion of the network of web servers connected through the “solar protocol”, by creating two new nodes, one at ZHdK and one at the Island School of Social Autonomy, on Vis, Croatia. Solar Protocol is an experimental, artist-developed protocol that connects web servers around the globe. What is unique about this network is that the servers are not connected to the conventional energy grid, but to a solar panel, from which they draw their energy. Each server is only available as long as the sun provides sufficient energy. However, all servers mirror the content of each other locally. The content is then served from the server that has the most energy at this particular moment. The project connects, functionally but also aesthetically, digital communication with the diurnal cycle, a planetary rhythm which affects almost all forms of life. It relocalizes seemingly placeless infrastructures and emphasizes that technology, as everything else, depends on larger systems we cannot control.
The second aim is to create works within the space that this protocol opens up. That space is, in many ways, the opposite of the spaces that contemporary infrastructures provide. It is intensely local, dependent on the changing planetary and atmospheric conditions. It’s based on intentional collaboration and resource sharing and treats computation as a scarce resource, one that, like all natural resources, we need to use with care.
What interests us is to rethink the digital as something that does not pretend to be “immaterial” but, rather, takes its own materiality seriously and considers its multi-fold entanglement with the material world. This runs counter to the dominant way of approaching the digital, where ever larger data centers stand in a parasitic relationship to the world, sucking dry their immediate environment and generating unsustainable energy demands. Our immediate interest lies in the world that opens up when we treat technological, social, and ecological factors equally. What artistic strategies can create such relations, and what kind of aesthetics can make such a world accessible?