Welcome to the Federation

Special Issue 8

publishing in situated federated networks

For the 8th Special Issue, we will base our work around the idea of online federation to question^* what federated publishing could be.

The trimester is roughly divided into two parts.

We will start the trimester with a deep dive into the practice of the homebrew server admin and study different social and material conditions of hosting material online. While self-hosting together, we will establish connections, host softwares, create tools and work on small prototypes to develop a practical and small scale understanding of online federation as a concept and its potential for novel publishing practices. Along the way, with the help of our self-hosted tools, we will document our understandings and questions, log our conversations and list our resources.

During the second part of the trimester we will change our scope and focus our attention to one particular emerging distributed online publishing protocol called ActivityPub. This protocol and the multiple projects that together constitute the ActivityPub network, will be our guide to ask (and answer?) questions about the relation between online publishing, communities, infrastructures and politics.

We will transform these questions into a collection of clients (interfaces) that interact with the ActivityPub network. These clients will situate themselves in the network and will therefore speak to/address a specific audience. This could be done in many ways, for example through automated tools that generate text, interfaces that filter content in a specific way, or a tool that can be used to access the network.

Depending on your publishing ideas, you will work on one (or more) clients (alone or together) that interact with the ActivityPub network. We would like to approach these clients as online digital zines, turning them into small but explicit and opinionated stand-alone publications that we present during the final launch in Varia in April.

^*

How can federated services reaffirm the relation between social organization and technical infrastructure which was historically undone with the shift to web 2.0?

How can self-hosting together become an act of understanding what it means to become a node and relate to others?

What is the practice and shape of federated publishing and what can it be? How can we position the practice of design and publishing in the realm of federated networks?

How can we work with a protocol as a tool to study understandings of control and governance? How could federation be a tool to question our understanding of networks? How do federated networks differ from other forms of distributed networks?

What could be ways to interface a network, that translates its mechanisms, activities and attitudes?

If we start to publish anouncements, blog posts, photographs, video's and other types of media, in a federated way, how do we understand the federated status of content, flowing in between multiple nodes? What semiotic objects are we dealing with, if text is interrelated to multiple contexts, layouts and languages?

Our guests

Editors

Varia (NL) is a Rotterdam based initiative focused on working with, on and through everyday technology. At its core the initiative aims to be a social infrastructure from which to collaboratively facilitate critical understandings on the technologies that surround us. The initiative is a membership-based organisation striving to become a space for questions, opinions, modifications, help and action. http://varia.zone/

Roel Roscam Abbing (NL) is an artist and researcher whose work engages with the issues and cultures surrounding networked computation. He engages with themes such as network infrastructures, the politics of technology and do-it-yourself approaches. He holds an MA Networked Media from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and a Fine Arts BA from the Willem De Kooning Academy. Currently he also works as a teacher in Digital Media at the department of Graphic Design in Artez, Arnhem. He is also a member of the homebrewserver.club and Varia. https://roelof.info

Manetta Berends (NL) is a graphic designer with an interest in networked publishing & free software. Her practice is rooted in practical investigations into the sociality of publishing software. Besides working on commissions, projects and workshops, Manetta is one of Varia's members. http://www.manettaberends.nl

Schedule

Week 1

Tuesday 8 January

• 11:00 Special Issue 8 introduction
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30
• 17:00 End

Homebrew homework (for next week): connect your server to the internet

Week 2

Tuesday 15 January

• 11:00 Homebrewserver infrastructour, going online, experiencing particularities of hosting situations - logging self-hosting anecdotes, experiences, questions and routers together.
• 17:00 End

Week 3

Tuesday 22 January

• 11:00 Self-hosted federated publishing prototypes
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30 Self-hosted federated publishing prototypes
• 17:00 End

Week 4

Tuesday 29 January

• 11:00 Self-hosted federated publishing prototypes
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30 Self-hosted federated publishing prototypes
• 17:00 End

Week 5

Tuesday 5 February

• 11:00 Self-hosted federated publishing prototypes
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30 Self-hosted federated publishing prototypes
• 17:00 End

Week 6

Tuesday 12 February

• 11:00 Introduction ActivityPub
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30
• 17:00 End

Week 7

No class, studyweek

Week 8

No class, spring vacation

Week 9

Tuesday 5 March

• 11:00
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30
• 17:00 End

Week 10

Tuesday 12 March

• 11:00
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30
• 17:00 End

Week 11

Tuesday 19 March

• 11:00
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30
• 17:00 End

Week 12

Tuesday 26 March

• 11:00
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30
• 17:00 End

Week 13

Tuesday 2 April

• 11:00
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30
• 17:00 End

Thursday 4 April (tbc.)

• Special Issue 8 launch @ Varia (tbc.)