Die Referentin bringt seit mehreren Heften eine Serie über frühe soziale Bewegungen und emanzipatorische Entwicklungen. Über die revolutionäre Gewerkschaftsbewegung des Anarchosyndikalismus, von seiner Entstehung vor etwa 100 Jahren bis zu seiner Renaissance in den letzten Jahren schreibt Hans Huber.

La Lucha en Barcelona. Foto Archiv Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona

CNT, autre futur. Plakat CNT. Foto Privat

Vor einhundert Jahren existierte international eine revolutionäre Gewerkschaftsbewegung, die heute kaum mehr bekannt ist. Die Rede ist vom Anarchosyndikalismus. Seine Hochblüte erlebte dieser in der Zwischenkriegszeit, doch Faschismus und Zweiter Weltkrieg ließen von der einstigen Massenbewegung nur mehr kümmerliche Reste über. Was zeichnete diese Gewerkschaften aus und weshalb erlebt die Idee des Anarchosyndikalismus in den letzten Jahren eine Renaissance?

Von der Geburt des Syndikalismus …
Wenn heute von der Gewerkschaft die Rede ist, so sind damit im deutschsprachigen Raum die großen Einheitsgewerkschaften gemeint. Der ÖGB vereint verschiedene politische Fraktionen und verhandelt als eine Gewerkschaft sozialpartnerschaftlich mit den Verbänden der Arbeitgeber. Solche Gewerkschaften bilden in Europa jedoch die Ausnahme – in anderen Ländern wie Frankreich und Spanien existieren Richtungsgewerkschaften mit unterschiedlichen weltanschaulichen oder parteipolitischen Ausrichtungen.

In Frankreich entstand Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts auch der Syndikalismus. Dieser verwarf die Grundidee der damaligen zersplitterten sozialistischen Parteien, mittels Wahlen die Lebenssituation der Arbeiter*innen zu verbessern und zum Sozialismus zu gelangen. Stattdessen sollte der Klassenkampf unmittelbar im ökonomischen Bereich durch die Gewerkschaften geführt werden – mittels „direkter Aktion“, also z. B. Streik, Boykott oder Sabotage. Neben dem „Kampf ums tägliche Brot“ mit dem Ziel von sofortigen Verbesserungen – also z. B. Verkürzung der Arbeitszeit oder Lohnerhöhungen – verfolgte der Syndikalismus darüber hinaus das Ziel einer sozialen Revolution.

Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts formte sich schließlich als eigene Strömung der Anarchosyndikalismus aus. Seine Theorien basieren auf den Vorstellungen des anarchistischen Sozialismus, während sich die Organisationsform an den revolutionären Syndikalismus anlehnt. Im Unterschied zu Parteisozialist*innen jeglicher Couleur verwerfen Anarchosyndi­kalis­t*in­nen die Idee, den Sozialismus „staatlich von oben herab“ einzuführen. Denn Verstaatlichung der Wirtschaft kann „nur zur schlimmsten Form der Ausbeutung, zum Staatskapitalismus, nie aber zum Sozialismus führen“ (Prinzipienerklärung des Syndikalismus, 1919). Statt zentralistischer Lenkung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft durch den sozialistischen (Einparteien-)Staat erstreben Anarchosyndikalist*innen einen libertären Sozialismus, der föderalistisch von unten nach oben organisiert sein soll. Die Gewerkschaft bildet dabei das Kampfinstrument zur Verbesserung der aktuellen Lebenssituation sowie zur Übernahme der Produktionsmittel in der sozialen Revolution und gleichzeitig auch die Basis der Organisation der neuen sozialistischen Wirtschaft.

… über die anarchosyndika­listischen Gewerkschafts­internationale …
In den 1920er-Jahren schlossen sich Gewerkschaften mehrerer Kontinente von Argentinien über die USA und Europa bis Japan in einer diesen Zielsetzungen verpflichteten Gewerkschaftsinternationalen zusammen. Die „Internationale Arbeiter Assoziation“ (IAA) vereinte in ihrer Blütezeit vier Millionen Mitglieder.

Auch in Deutschland erlebte der Anarchosyndikalismus nach dem ersten Weltkrieg einen Aufschwung: die aus der „Freien Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften“ hervorgegangene anarchosyndikalistische „Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (FAUD)“ zählte Anfang der 1920er-Jahre über 125.000 Mitglieder mit Hochburgen in den Bergbauregionen des Ruhrgebiets und einzelnen Industriestädten. In ihrer 1919 angenommen Prinzipienerklärung heißt es: „Die Syndikalisten (…) sind prinzipielle Gegner jeder Monopolwirtschaft. Sie erstreben die Vergesellschaftung (…) aller sozialen Reichtümer.“.

Die FAUD beteiligte sich an zahlreichen Streiks und stellte im Ruhraufstand 1920 (Märzrevolution) einen Teil der „Roten Ruhrarmee“. Von 1923 bis 1932 schrumpfte sie schließlich auf einige tausend Mitglieder – die Reste der unter dem Nationalsozialismus illegal weiteragierenden Organisation wurden 1936/37 von der Gestapo zerschlagen und in mehreren Prozessen vor dem Volksgerichtshof abgeurteilt.

In Österreich standen Anarchismus und Anarchosyndikalismus zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts im Schatten der starken Sozialdemokratie. Zwar gab es kleine anarchosyndikalistische Gewerkschaften und Propagandagruppierungen, über eine Gesamtmitgliederzahl von 2.000 kamen diese jedoch nicht hinaus.

… zur sozialen Revolution in Spanien 1936
Das Land mit der stärksten anarchosyndikalistischen Massenbewegung stellte Spanien in der Mitte der 1930er-Jahre dar. Die Confederation National de Trabajo (CNT) verfügte zu diesem Zeitpunkt über eine Million Mitglieder. Als 1936 rechte Generäle gegen die Linksregierung putschten, folgte bereits in den ersten Tagen des Spanischen Bürgerkriegs eine soziale Revolution in weiten Teilen Kataloniens und Andalusiens: die CNT übernahm die Kontrolle über zahlreiche Betriebe, richtete Agrarkollektive ein und versuchte ihre Vorstellung eines libertären Sozialismus umzusetzen. Die gesellschaftlichen Umwälzungen beschränkten sich dabei nicht auf den wirtschaftlichen Bereich, sondern erfassten auch die Schulen, das Gesundheitswesen oder die „Geschlechterfrage“. So organisierten sich etwa 20.000 Frauen bei den anarchistisch-feministischen „Mujeres Libres“.

Gemäß den föderalistischen Vorstellungen im Anarchismus wiesen vor allem die Agrarkollektive unterschiedlichste kollektivistische und kommunistische Formen auf: manche Dörfer und Kleinstädte schafften das Geld ab, andere entlohnten nach Familie, wieder andere individuell. Und in vielen Dörfern existierten neben dem Kollektiv individuelle Bewirtschaftungsformen für jene weiter, die sich dem Kollektiv nicht anschließen wollten. Ein komplexes System lokaler und überregionaler Vernetzung sorgte für die Rohstoff- und Materialbeschaffung und die Verteilung der produzierten Produkte – ein libertärer Sozialismus von unten nach oben konträr zur zentralistischen Staatsverwaltung in der Sowjetunion.

George Orwell, der in Spanien in der marxistisch-antistalinistischen P.O.U.M. bewaffnet gegen den Faschismus gekämpft hatte, beschrieb diesen libertären Sozialismus in „Spanische Erfahrungen“ so: „Die normale Klasseneinteilung der Gesellschaft war in einem Umfang verschwunden, wie man es sich in der geldgeschwängerten Luft Englands fast nicht vorstellen kann. Niemand lebte dort (Aragon, Anm.) außer den Bauern und uns selbst, und niemand hatte einen Herrn über sich. (…) Ich weiß sehr genau, wie es heute zum guten Ton gehört zu verleugnen, daß der Sozialismus etwas mit Gleichheit zu tun hat. In jedem Land der Welt ist ein ungeheurer Schwärm Parteibonzen und schlauer, kleiner Professoren beschäftigt zu „beweisen“, daß Sozialismus nichts anderes bedeutet als planwirtschaftlicher Staatskapitalismus (…). Aber zum Glück gibt es daneben auch eine Version des Sozialismus, die sich hiervon gewaltig unterscheidet.“

Doch innerhalb der republikanischen Gebiete erwuchs dieser Revolution ein erstarkender Gegner:
Die an Stalin orientierte Kommunistische Partei PCE entwickelte sich „zur Verfechterin des Privateigentums und der Interessen des Mittelstandes.“ (Walther L. Bernecker) Sie nutzte ihren stark wachsenden Einfluss in der Volksfrontregierung, unterdrückte ab Mai 1937 P.O.U.M und CNT und zerschlug zahlreiche Landkollektive. Auf die Niederlage der Revolution folgte 1939 die Niederlage der Linken im spanischen Bürgerkrieg.

Vom Niedergang bis zum Neuaufleben des Anarchosyndikalismus heute
War der Höhepunkt der meisten (anarcho)syndikalistischen Gewerkschaften in den 1920er-Jahren erreicht, so befanden sich die übriggebliebenen Reste nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg im Niedergang. Der Historiker Marcel van der Linden beschreibt drei Wege ihrer weiteren Entwicklung:
a) das Festhalten an den ihren Prinzipien und darauffolgende Marginalisierung
b) Änderung ihres Kurses und Anpassung an neue Bedingungen – und somit die Aufgabe syndikalistischer Prinzipien
c) Auflösung oder Aufgehen in einer nicht-syndikalistischen Gewerkschaft

Von einzelnen lokalen Ausnahmen wie der SAC in Schweden oder dem Wiederaufleben der CNT in Spanien Anfang der 1970er-Jahre abgesehen, existierte der (Anarcho)Syndikalismus hauptsächlich noch als Ideengemeinschaft, aber nicht mehr als wahrnehmbare gewerkschaftliche Kraft.

Seit den 1990er-Jahren ist eine Trendwende und ein internationales Wiederaufleben anarchosyndikalistischer Ideen bemerkbar. Neu gegründete oder erstarkte Gewerkschaften mit (anarcho)syndikalistischer Prägung finden sich vor allem in jenen prekarisierten Bereichen, die von herkömmlichen Gewerkschaften vernachlässigt werden. So konnte etwa die 1977 wiedergegründete Freie Arbeiter*innen Union (FAU) in Deutschland in den vergangenen Jahren verstärkt an gewerkschaftlichem Profil gewinnen und damit auch ihre Mitgliederzahl deutlich steigern – heute sind wieder über 1.300 Menschen in Deutschland Mitglied in einer anarchosyndikalistischen Gewerkschaft. Neben zahlreichen kleineren Auseinandersetzungen z. B. um Lohnzahlungen machte sie mit ihrem Einsatz für rumänische Bauarbeiter in Berlin („Mall of Shame“), mit der Unterstützung eines wilden Streiks von 150 Erntehelfer*innen bei Bonn 2020 oder mit der Organisierung von Arbeitskämpfen von Fahrradkurier*innen von sich reden. Die spanische CNT-Abspaltung CGT verfügt heute über 80.000 Mitglieder und ist z. B. auch in feministischen Kämpfen (Frauenstreik) aktiv.

In Österreich existieren derzeit mit dem Wiener Arbeiter*innen Syndikat (WAS) und den Wobblies (IWW) zwei kleine Gewerkschaftsgruppen, die sich auf anarchosyndikalistische bzw. syndikalistische Traditionslinien beziehen. In den vergangenen Jahren konnte dabei das WAS in (Lohn)Auseinandersetzungen mehrere Erfolge erzielen. Ihre modernen Kämpfe „ums tägliche Brot“ reihen sich ein in das Wiederaufleben einer sozialrevolutionären Gewerkschaftsbewegung, die nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg fast in Vergessenheit geriet.

Die Serie in der Referentin ist auf Anregung von Andreas Gautsch bzw. der Gruppe Anarchismusforschung entstanden, siehe auch: anarchismusforschung.org

Art Meets Radical Openness as debugging together: The 2022 edition of the festival AMRO in June is dedicated to the rituals and the philosophies of debugging. This will be taken as starting point for a conversation between artists, groups and communities moving together between the fields of culture, politics and technologies. Davide Bevilaqua and the AMRO community about the wider context.

AMRO 2022 DEBUG. Bild Juan Pablo Linares**

First Computer Bug. Bild Wikimedia Commons*

In this text we’ll unpack the festival motto debug from the technological connotation to a wider understanding in terms of knowledge sharing and community practices. Those are at the core of the Art Meets Radical Openness spirit and we are looking forward to see them happening again in Linz at AMRO22, 15th – 18th June 2022.
The various thoughts that built the skeleton of AMRO22 emerged over multiple conversation with the AMRO community and participants. Other two texts published in the current edition of the Referentin will deepen the conceptual core of debug, one connecting it to the idea of pancomputationalism, another dealing with shared, feminist server infrastructure.

When reality is shaped by tech, can we debug it?
In the long tail of the global pandemic and in the middle of a war, probably nothing needs to be said to convince the reader that we live in an era in which the effect of the networked technologies permeate more and more in the public and private spaces within our societies. Writer and artist James Bridle suggests that the much advertised networked infrastructures – in combination with the rampant destabilizing effects of climate change and the only apparently non-logical dynamics of the globalized geopolitical tensions – are mostly causing the erosion of our capacity of understanding the world around us, rather than contributing to its improvement. According to Bridle, the consequences of the widespread adoption of technologies is de facto co-responsible for the emergence of characteristics similar to the ones of a New Dark Age¹, in which the complexity and concurrencies of immediate, world-scaled computation machineries push us into conspiracies or collective, cognitive misestimation. At the core of this there is a self-enforcing loop: we are lost in the ways each one of us relates to the surrounding world, and yet tent to turn to the same sources of incomprehension to make order, generating a feedback loop of mismatched readings.
The effects of climate change are warning signs of an environmentally harmful behavior; psychological and social disorders, economic imbalances, the loss of a reality system, or the potent return of history in a too-long ignored war building process. All of these can be read as signs of the end of the epoch commonly known as Western modernity, that was maybe naively thought as everlasting and that now is defenitely in a moment of crisis and shifting of values, if not more. What to do now? Even if we are not necessarily approaching the end of our epoch as the philosopher Federico Campagna echoes in Technic and Magic,² it seems nevertheless urgent to reflect on which values to retain for the future and which ones we should abandon.
Seeing our era so influenced by faulty technological processes, we wonder if a hint for a solution might come from problem-solving practices that emerge from the same technological space. Within the festival program, we reflect how some concepts relating to debugging might help imagine strategies to deal with this scenario of constant emergency and overall uncertainty.
This is grounded on the idea that the any own instrument – from the technical till the conceptual ones – is potentially fallible, and that one can then choose to challenge that imprecision and try to overcome bugs and limits. A whole different image of technology is needed here, seeing machines as situated and needing constant care, with the practice of tool maintainance as a knowledge generation one happening in communities. Those aspects will be deepened in the various program points of AMRO22 debug.

Bugs scratch the surface of the digital
Bugs might be the causes of a program crashing or the browser window gets stuck; or when the developers’ biases come to surface or where the limits of the current infrastructure are reached. In the last months we also got accustomed to the idea that bugs emerge also due to geopolitical or company-strategic decisions, proving once more the ephemeral irresistibility of the globalized and industrialized world. Not all of these errors, unavailabilities or bad functioning are due to the presence of an engineering bug in its strict sense, yet they appear of interest and shall be included in a wider discussion dealing with debugging.
Under the eyes of radical openness, software bugs are therefore much more than simple engineering mistakes. They are the moments in which this surface-tension of perfection and infallibility of the ubiquituous machinery is broken and its inner logic gets briefly exposed – like the glitch in the matrix.
Where technology fails, computer systems appear as what they are: funky, unstable conglomerates of functions, thrown together from different people in different times, at the point that they are barely working, needing constant care and fixes. This is one of the big conceptual shifts from the most known image of the abstract and perfect technology to the one of a situated technology that is in perpetuous exchange with its surroundings, susceptible to temporal and modal changes of it. Like the famous Mark II of the University of Harvard, whose malfunctioning was due to an actual bug hidden in a relay discovered by Admiral and computer scientist Grace Hopper³; something conceptually very unexpected, but in reality quite likely to happen considering how large these machines and their electromechanical component were.
With this in mind, bugs, mistakes and crashes start looking like some of the fundamental features of the current era of ubiquitous technologies, features that contribute demistify tech and call for action and personal and communitarian engagement. Acknowledgeing the faultiness of the infrastructure is fundamental, but one should go further than superficially making glitch into an art form; rather metabolizing its fault and using that to learn and build something new.

Debugging is the line where the unknown starts and ends
In software development, debugging comprises a set of more or less formalized practices to go through computer failure and try solving it. Seeing it in a wider context, it is not such an elitary activity, but rather an everyday action taken whenever a devices does not work as expected.
Most of the times malfunctionings are in fact solved with a simple restart of the affected device, the classic turning it off and on again. Some other times, fixing it means opening the black box and checking its inner functions, and step by step excluding the working parts to isolate what needs to be fixed or removed to insure the smooth functioning of the machine – such as Hopper’s moth. And finally, some debugging strategies might imply the adoption of a completely different tool. It is not only about isolating the problem, but also recognizing what works well and finding a new workable equilibrium, maybe with a smart hack or with some freshly gathered knowledge coming from the community.
The intention of AMRO22 is to envision debugging as a larger spectrum of practices that start from the technical realm and are then applied in the form of observational strategies also in other fields⁴. When performed within a non-working system, debugging helps the debugger to formulate and verify hypothesis about the inner processes of the system. It does not require complicated actions, but an open spirit of observation and a system of trial and error to solve or circumvent the narrowpasses. This helps understanding debugging as a process of knowledge creation rather than one of a mere problem finding and fixing, in which information and experiences on a specific problem is tested and accumulated.
Under this light, we could also find in debugging the quality that Deleuze found in the practice of writing, that is happening on the border between ignorance and knowledge⁵, and specifically progressively transforming the first in the latter.

Debugging as practice of knowledge sharing
Lastly, we are interested in the ways this knowledge is shared and circulates amongst different communities.
One of the many mottos from the communities of Free and Libre Open Source Softwares is “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, also known as Linus’s law⁶ – meaning that the more reviewers see a specific software problem, the quicker a possible solution will emerge. The presence of many eyes – or a community – offers the ground for a wider generation of information and the sharing of experiences. This knowledge is transmitted and can be stored for a later use of the same communities or made available for other groups; documentation of debugging practices becomes here a process of recurrent adoption, verification and validation or extension of the pre-existent notes.
The strategies through which this happens are specific and independently found for any community of interests or practice and might vary a lot in style and formats – also due to the specific case in which the notes are taken and how they should be accessed in a second moment. They can be a technical documentation on a wiki, or a cooperative text resumè in an etherpad; also a picture of a post-it wall or an artwork might help in bringing knowledge further in the future.
Here is where debugging might cease to be a mere technological problem-solving solution and becomes an attitude of radical openness; creating a social environment prone to self critique and therefore, at least in theory, a bit more protected from the dangers of the current technological-driven individualization.
Embracing the bugs appears to be therefore more important than avoiding them in the first place.

1 James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, Verso, 2018.

2 Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic. The Reconstruction of Reality, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018

3 www.howtogeek.com/726020/what-is-a-computer-bug-and-where-did-the-term-come-from (retrieved 12 May 2022)

4 Check The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation. Methods from the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory, Constant, Brussels, 2018. www.books.constantvzw.org/home/tgso

5 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1968, preface.

6 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus’s_law

* commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Computer_Bug,_1945.jpg This file is a work of a sailor or employee of the U.S. Navy, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain in the United States.

** AMRO22 design by Juan Pablo Linares. Sujet concept was developed in a group workshop with Christoph Haag.

AMRO22 – Art Meets Radical Openness DEBUG
15th–18th June 2022
afo – architekturforum oberösterreich, Stadtwerkstatt, Kunstuniversität Linz, and more.
art-meets.radical-openness.org

A Transversal Network of Feminist Servers (ATNOFS) ist ein gemeinschaftliches Projekt, das einen intersektionalen, feministischen und ökologischen Impuls verfolgt und darauf abzielt, einen alternativen Umgang mit digitalen Werkzeugen und Plattformen zu erkunden. Vertreterinnen des Projekts werden wir bei der aktuellen Ausgabe von AMRO im Juni treffen.

Bild Varia/ANTOFS

ATNOFS will ein europaweites Netzwerk der Solidarität schaffen und vernetzt bereits ähnlich inspirierte Initiativen in den Niederlanden, Belgien, Österreich, Rumänien und Griechenland. Die in Rotterdam ansässige Initiative Varia entwickelt außerdem den reisenden, feministischen Server „Rosa“ und koordiniert das Projekt ANTOFS mit Hilfe der Partnerorganisation Constant. Hier beantwortet die Fragen von Selin Genc für ATNOFS: die Intitiativen Constant, HYPHA, Feminist Hack Meetings, esc, LURK, ooooo, Marloes de Valk und Varia. Das folgende Interview wurde in englischer Sprache beibehalten.

What has inspired you to create ATNOFS, and what urgencies are you responding to?
In the past couple of years, many organisations in our network and beyond have been forced to transition their activity entirely online, all the while receiving no external support in this process. This has led to a growing reliance on centralised, proprietary, commercial infrastructure providers which brings to the forefront several issues such as lack of privacy and agency, monopoly, misinformation. A Transversal Network of Feminist Servers (ATNOFS) is a project that aims to bring visibility of counter-efforts and provide them with a framework to consolidate their projects, help structure their cooperation, and inspire others to create similar or join such initiatives.
Our priority is to create a public debate around the following questions: how to engage with digital tools that we may not have tried before (file sharing, forums, web hosting, federated social media and collaborative note taking); how to potentially develop new tools that could emerge from the series of exchanges, including community related resources for self-organising, decision making, trust building, knowledge exchange; how to strengthen existing bonds and create new ones. All while keeping in mind the different local urgencies and needs of each partner: the lack of self-hosted and self-organised infrastructures in certain regions; the lack of physical spaces and the lack of long-term support for administering feminist servers; the need for safe online spaces; the need to configure and maintain a mutually supportive network, from sharing hosted services such as cloud and encrypted file-sharing, online surveys, code distribution and version control systems, to server mirroring as backup mechanisms between the mentioned organisations and beyond.

What is a feminist server? What does a community around such a server look like?
By server we mean a computer that can be connected to the Internet, run a website and provide file storage. It will be passed from one partner to another, as both a tool and collective storage to document the traces of our activities. Our feminist travelling server will therefore capture what emerges from a series of events related to the urgencies we described. We believe that such an approach to documentation will enable reflections, as well as making public the diversity of generated material.
The work is especially inspired by the tenets of the Feminist Server Manifesto. A feminist server “is a situated technology” and “is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies”. It “treats network technology as part of a social reality” and “radically questions the conditions for serving and service”. Such a server is a safe social space of learning, speculating and exchanging knowledge that questions technology and its dependencies within the systems it is embedded in. The community around it weaves together different practices of system administration, care and maintenance which are shaped in relation to feminist principles.

Can you tell us more about the events? Who will be attending them, and what is the nature of activities that will take place?
Each partner will create a series of two days of live events that will be documented in a chapter of the publication.
Feminist Hack Meetings (FHM) (GR) will focus on free/open-source software development and online privacy. In the first day, they will discuss about alternative social media as a response to the use of Facebook by feminist collectives in the Greek context. In the second day, they will be working on a feminist server, by providing a hands-on system administration essentials workshop based on a manual by the Systerserver, and a discussion on governance and feminist collectives.
HYPHA (RO) aims to coagulate the local community of activists around self-managed technologies and open-source alternatives to corporate surveilance. The first day will consist of theoretical discussions regarding the needs and issues of the local community and the second day will focus on a series of technical hands-on workshops.
Constant (BE) will research and question how technological tools and initiatives developed as a counter response to the authoritative and capitalist logic widely present in the computer tech sector can align with colonial and patriarchal frameworks. They will be looking at two main threads of research. The first one is etherbox, a local server, tweaked to specific needs of being able to document locally. For the second, they want to look at the way Yunohost works, an operating system aimed to facilitate administration, and how this structures a system.
LURK (FR/NL/PT) currently provides online services and access to alternative social media. During the event, LURK will offer a two days workshop/sprint about the fediverse (Mastodon particularly). While on the first day the workshop will focus on the installation process, it will be followed by a discussion on customisation and member onboarding on the second day. The workshop will go in depth into this subject, while bootstrapping respective communities to use these instances.
Varia‘s (NL) contribution to the traveling server will be focused around feminist federated publishing. In the first session hosted in Varia, a new intersectional feminist server will be installed that will provide the publishing infrastructure for the rest of the partners. The server will document its own process of installation as well as the session itself. It will then travel to other locations, where it can inform the development of other servers.
Esc (AU) will use their expertise as a media art laboratory which facilitates encounters between artists, scientists, theoreticians and programmers from the most varied disciplines. In a core team of 5 people, they will develop a travelling feminist server swarm, that shall consist of a mixture of real functioning hardware based on raspberry pi and imaginative and speculative parts and ingredients that suggest a fiction of interrelated channels of exchange.

What might such a network of solidarity look like in the long-term?
The collaboration of a set of existing cultural, feminist and self-hosted servers located in Europe and ran by the partners will try to extend their allies and participants towards places and countries where open source and decentralised media platforms and services are not yet supported nor accessible. Such platforms and tools are absolutely necessary to establish cultural agency outside of the current media oligopolies. They are needed to enable and democratise cultural and political expression outside of obscure ranking algorithms, incoherent content filters, and advertising monetisation.
Our goal is to achieve a long-term collaboration framework within a growing network of federated self-hosters which follow feminist, intersectional principles. The network can subsequently grow after the completion of the project, supported by the shared resources and infrastructure that will be established throughout it. Through the Culture of Solidarity fund we also met many initiatives, which show a similar attention to infrastructural politics and with whom we would like to find ways to collaborate.

What is the outreach of the project? Who is the audience you wish to engage?
The results of the project will be documented in real time on the server itself and in a publication. Each node will promote the events and the publication using different channels to their desired audience within a local and international reach. The audience from our partners are highly specialised and therefore hold the position of multipliers which will be useful for the circulation of these ideas to a broader audience.
The different partners aim to reach local LGBTQ+ activists and artists (FHM), local and international audiences interested in the intersection of artistic research, media and technology (Constant), self-organised artist/activist collectives (Varia), artists, scientists, theoreticians and programmers who intersect disciplines (esc), EU cultural institutions, artists, scholars, and art and design educators and their students (LURK), local organisations, among which groups of independent artists, housing activists, intersectional feminists, students, queer and Roma people (HYPHA).
The organisations partnering in this project already have practices addressed at increasing inclusivity in technological processes and work to support marginalised and underrepresented groups in their respective contexts. For example the Feminist Hack Meetings, which respond to the traditional underrepresentation of people who identify as women/queer/nonbinary in male-dominated hacker spheres.

What is the interplay between the local and the pan-European in your project?
Due to limited access to funding, and no formal structure or organisational network, the question of autonomy and sovereignty in relation to network services, data storage, and digital infrastructures is difficult to engage with at a European level. In practice, it rarely goes beyond the scope of local hacker and maker spaces, DIY and self-hosted websites, isolated media and cultural associations, and online communities. However, it is not for a lack of knowledge and willingness. There is an urgent need to develop interrelational connections across Europe, making use of existing small scale infrastructures, knowledge and skills.
ATNOFS is responding to the need for continuity, interrelation and support for existing efforts in The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and to the lack of self-hosted and self-organised infrastructures in Romania and Greece, from lack of physical spaces to the lack of long-term support for administering their existing structures. ATNOFS will connect several partners from these countries around collective practices of developing, hosting and implementing tools and methods that reflect their needs, interests and cultural environment. By collectivising these, the different partners in the network wish to give and receive support within it and subsequently share it further within each partner’s respective community and local cultural network.

Die Fragen in diesem Interview hat Selin Genc im Namen der European Cultural Foundation gestellt. Quelle: culturalfoundation.eu/stories/cosround4_atnofs

AMRO22 – Art Meets Radical Openness DEBUG
15th–18th June 2022
afo – architekturforum oberösterreich, Stadtwerkstatt, Kunstuniversität Linz, and more.
art-meets.radical-openness.org