[Project in progress]
Developed with COPINCHA and HackBo
ABSTRACT
!ARTs is a simplified digital representation of the totality of folders and files shared in each !!!Sección ARTE (ART Section). !!!Sección ARTE is an offline curatorial space that exists since 2015 within the Paquete Semanal (Weekly Package), the most notable phenomenon of Cuba’s alternative digital context. This project is the result of several years of research around Weekly Package in which the artist unfolds in the role of curator and/or curator. His focus is on the informal ways of information circulation, digital piracy, alternative networks, the art-society relationship, the limits of net art and new media-offline art, as well as their social interaction within the spaces of mass culture.
STATEMENT
!ARTs is a simplified digital representation of all the folders and files shared in each !!!Sección ARTE (ART Section). The structure and development of this stage of the project was carried out in collaboration with Maurice Haedo and Offray Luna. In technological terms, the project resorts to “pocket infrastructures” (Luna Cardenas, 2014), which are simple, autonomous, self-contained and extensible. They can be run both online and offline, from a USB stick, a Raspberry Pi type computer or a modest server. This project, which stands on the other side of the digital divide, follows the principle of simplifying infrastructure to amplify participation (…), helping to blur the distinction between (de)building content and (de)building inclusive and empowering interactive infrastructures (Luna Cárdenas, 2014).
!ARTs stands in the interstices between the individual and the collective, the online and the offline, the community and the corporate, the analog and the digital. Replicating the logics of the Weekly Package in terms of the use of alternative networks and segmented infrastructures, it aims to find communities or artistic projects to host online. In this way the information would exist both on multiple servers interconnected with each other and navigating outside the margins of the Internet, through the Weekly Package.
The whole process of conception and programming of !ARTs was documented and is available through a manual on the GitHub platform for free use.
—
Contributors: Gaia Tedone, Nicolas Malevé, Maurice Haedo, Offray Luna.