Chapter 2a: Server Issues: Platform Infrastructure

The reality of having a studio within a meanwhile space is that much of the infrastructure is crumbling. When In-grid first set up the Raspberry pis the hope was to host them there indefinately, but it quickly became apparent that it was not viable, the ethernet ports in the room were not functional, the wi-fi was not reliable and the team maintaining the building are primarily artists themselves rather than corporate service providers, therefore estate support is more sporadic.  

SPACE 2. Haus der Kulturen der Welt MUSEUM, Berlin, Germany (HKW): A center for contemporary arts, publicly funded by the federal government. The space hosts art exhibitions, theater and performance, films, and academic conferences. It also contains cafes and shops, and is generally open to the public, with some ticketed events. This space is in Germany. We presented in this space as part of the Transmediale Festival, which is a 'platform for critical reflection on cultural transformation from a post-digital perspective '. We brought the pi to Berlin as part of Content/Form, a research workshop culminating in a publication of a peer reviewed newspaper including contributions on the idea that content is entagled/inseperable from the forms and formats in/which it's rendered.

These spaces are demonstrably quite different, in their scale, security and publicness. That being said there are common experiences when arriving in cultural spaces with a mobile server. We need to feel out the location every time, understand levels of access, the policies and politics of these spaces, and of the duty of care/legislative duties each institution needs to respect, which may also change in relation to geography. We may have developed our protocols of working, but these cannot be impressed upon other spaces indiscriminately, we need to acknowledge that we are sharing this space with its caretakers, and also with other creative groups with their own needs and working practices, and the wider public who may be impacted and interested in our presence, or who may not be aware we are sharing the space at all.

In our experience, cultural spaces are more personal and negotiable than Educational Institutions, despite the possibility for equal levels of government oversight and private interests. Crutially have found that Cultural Spaces have become intrinsic to our ability to experiment publicly and accessibly. The most profound difference we have observed is the ability to establish a personal connection with individuals in order to make something happen, or adjust/remove a factor which is impeding us (locked doors, firewalls). In short, in cultural spaces, it's easier to find people, whereas we have found that (at least UK based) Universities adopt more detached processes. We have found that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find faces on campuses, whereas in cultural spaces we have found it easier to locate technical staff, other tenants, communities of users or visitor coordinators. Indeed, while in HKW we were unable to idenify which ethernet port worked, we were able to fetch someone from the site who know. If we wanted to do something similar in a UK University we would be unlikely to find someone, rather we find help-desk ticketing systems that would need to wait for a email response after filling a form with description, screenshots, and credentials. This is of course a generalisation, and is not a reflection of the people labouring behind those ticketing systems, moreso it is of the changing nature of work and neoliberalisation of higher education systems.

We have found that while working within cultural spaces can be on occasion challenging, particularly in more precarious spaces where there may not be someone dedicated to sysadmin for example, they tend to be more flexible. We are less likely to have to justify our choices or working methods, there is understanding that we might try something unusual or even arguably needlessly convoluted (like bringing a server to an arts conference) in order to deliver something we assert can be meaningful.

DOMESTIC/PRIVATE SPACES

The wiki4print pi has ended up living in a house of an In-grid member in South London. How it came to be there was a result of the needs of caring for a temperamental Raspberry pi in a temperamental meanwhile space (SET studios). However, its particular journey through London and where it has landed was as much to do with the material constraints of internet access as it was to do with the needs of working in a collective. Passing hardware from hand to hand across London became a force that determined the material shape of the network: last minute plans, emergencies, the demands of work schedules, holidays, illness and commute times all played a part in the movement of the hardware.

On one occasion In-grid, NoNames and CC were engaging in an online working session to resolve an important functionality of wiki4print. The pi kept going offline and needed someone on hand to physically reset the device or reconnect to the internet. We had to pause the workshop, while the pi was physically moved from SET studios to the house of an In-grid member. Why to that person's house in particular? The house was the closest to the studio and on the way to work for the other In-grid member. While others took a tea break the server was handed from hand to hand at a doorstep in East London on a rainy grey day, stress was shared, the pi was re-booted, the workshop continued. Moreover, the server was about to travel to Germany for a conference and this necessitated it being physically accessible to a member of In-grid who was travelling to Germany.

We thought the pi kept going offline because the SET wi-fi was bad, this was one of the problems, but it was also a red herring. We discovered there was another issue while the pi was in its new home in East London (temporarily living under a bed so the ethernet cable could reach it). Through the process of being able to debug at any hour (lying on the floor beside the bed) we were able to discover that problems with accessing the pi online were due to the Raspberry pi overheating, freezing and shutting down processes which would take it offline. We bought a heat sink and fan for the pi, and from then on it worked reliably in all locations.

Maintaining server hardware in a domestic space or outside the context of a server farm (small or large) becomes an act of providing care at odd hours. Maintenance invites the rhythms and bodies of others into the material realities of the network. Cleaning the cat hair out of the fan of the raspberry pi or plugging in the pi because a guest did some hoovering and didn't realise what they were unplugging. When someone from the wider Servpub group reports that wiki4print is down on our mailing list, an In-grid member replies back with the latest anecdote about what has happened, providing a remote window into the lives and rhythms of bodies and hardware in spaces.

NATIONS/TRAVEL

So far, this writing has detailed the cultural, educational and domestic spaces that have housed the server at different times and for different reasons. Sometimes out of convenience, sometimes as an educational tool, sometimes as evidence that indeed a server can be built outside its farm and sometimes still we frankly brought the server along just-in-case. Cutting through all these spaces was the core attribute of this server being ambulant, which was a need highlighted and inspired by the Rosa project to which a significant portion of Servpub is owed. This need for mobility and reachability revealed the seams between what would otherwise be seamless transitions across different spaces with different [politics]. Perhaps most glaring of these seams were none other than the European borders themselves.

Though travelling with the hardware did little more than raise eyebrows from airport security staff, it was the crossing of a less ambulant person that almost prevented us from taking the server to Amsterdam in the summer of 2024 for the EASSSST/4S conference. The conference was to be attended by a small sub-group of the Servpub team, to present the project and host a hands-on workshop through the server. A member who was part of this group, had packed the hardware in their bag after having retrieved it from Becky for the purpose of this trip. They were, at the time of writing, holding refugee status in the UK and was allowed to travel within Europe with a UK issued Travel Document. But there were exceptions.

The conference was in Amsterdam to which they were allowed to travel, and the group were taking the Eurostar straight to their destination without making any stops. However, they were about to traverse a particularly absurd part of the French law pertaining to Visas and freedom movement. As the officers at the Eurostar terminal explained, it was because the train will be crossing over French territory, for which one of the In-grid members would need a visa, that they could not be allowed on the train. The fact the the destination was not in France and that the train was not due to make any stops in France did not matter. In fact, that argument only presented the more absurd speculation that in the case of an emergency stop or break-down of the train in France, they would be in breach of the visa law which and that was even more justification for refusing them entry to the train. Four hours later, other In-grid members were on their way and the server was still in London with another member's hand.

The solution was to take a direct flight to Amsterdam (and hope that it wouldn't emergency-land or break-down over France) for the next day. But having had no funding for this trip, and not being able to refund the train ticket, this was perhaps the most jarring spatial transition during this project. Not only did it reveal the limits of mobility and access, it also revealed the limits of collectivity and radical infrastructures. There was only so much infrastructure to radicalise when the political structures themselves oppressive and only getting worse.

EXPOSING THE AMBULENT INFRASTRUCTURE

Using small, mobile, or DIY servers makes tangible something normally abstract and distant. While our use of servers is almost constant, they rarely feel materially real. In contrast, our modest and often fragile setup reveals the seams of infrastructure, exposing the usually invisible dynamics of access, permission, and agency that shape how we move through institutions and shared spaces. Their scale and fallibility can be at times frustrating, but also embodied, as downtime or glitches often trace back not to impersonal systems failures but to the social realities of care, memory, or negotiation, like losing a password or deciding whether something is worth fixing at all. Working with such infrastructures invite collaboration, responsibility, and stewardship, giving us a sense of proximity and empowerment: we can point to the device, understand its workings, and intervene directly. In workshops, they act as access points to otherwise abstract network infrastructures, unsettling the seamless veneer of cloud computing and revealing the boundaries between hardware and software. Their mobility also highlights questions of access and borders, showing how technologies move differently than the people who maintain them. By exposing the fragility and contingency of networks, these servers make visible the social, affective, and political conditions of technological maintenance, reminding us that technology is not floating somewhere in the air, but grounded in material forms of labor, collaboration, and care.

Writing link: https://pad.riseup.net/p/PlatformInfrastructure-keep

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