On December 17th 2024, at 7pm at Stadtwerkstatt we conclude the current iteration of ReARDC by presenting the process done so far, the restructured core.servus.at website and the publication Artist Running Data Centers that documents the practices and ideals of running independent infrastructures and features several server projects.
Finally, we launch the new community visualization and portal available for the current ~300 members of servus.at: galaxy.servus.at & clusters.servus.at
In the circles of servus.at, the expression ARTIST RUN DATA CENTER (ARDC) refers to a set of virtual machines (VMs) set up in the server cluster that artists and collectives use as experimental production space. The first VMs were initiated in the 2010s and conceptualized around 2014 as ARDC. Over the past year, servus engaged again with the expression, the concept and begun a process of restructuring called reARDC – rethinking the Artist Run Data Center, this time involving not only the virtual machines, but also several website systems and the rest of the artists from the communities around servus.at. It initiated a wider discussion on the interconnection between the several components of the association and its activities, the infrastructure and the people inhabiting them.
The Versorgerin is one of the places where many key moments of the activities of servus.at are presented and made public, or where thoughts gather four times a year, even before knowing that they belong to a cohesive process. This was also the case for ReARDC, with the project first being announced in Versorgerin #141.1 The first thought however started circulating already a few years ago with the reflections about self-hosted infrastucture. In #130, the artist, activist and researcher Manu Luksch was interviewed about the art server scene of the 90s and how similar questions about autonomous networks could take form now.2
As often the case in initiatives running its own infrastructure, the project formed around a technical need, namely the one to update our main websites core.servus.at and radical-openness.org due to the end of support for the version of the Drupal software they are running on. Updating a website of that kind is never only a technical process and it often needs a wider perspective, especially if it is a portal that has grown through the years, was already updated a few times, and changed in structure over time. Its shape depends on decisions taken sometimes several years ago, due to reasons that might now seem obscure, based on formats that are obsolete today, and web technologies that were in the meantime further developed and no longer look like and perform how they used to. In this time frame, the entire association has slowly adapted, the generations of active team members are changing, and new workflows of interacting with the given website are passed down the line. It is therefore an intimate and delicate moment to witness and to be part of, to discover and learn, rather than to just wipe away the server and build a new archive.
Such occasions are in fact rare opportunities to rise fundamental questions that otherwise one shall not touch, such as: ‘Why are we still using Drupal?’, ‘Where is the community?’ or even ‘Why are we still hosting our own infrastructure?’. In normal projects those thoughts are mostly out of reach – and maybe only called in brief moments of despair, when especially in that moments there is actually no time to answer.
We thus begun researching the wider context of the servus activities, investigating the topics of autonomous infrastructure and self-hosting as well as the series of server projects that were set up over the last decade in the datacenter, the machine called “ARDC”. Some of them were already mentioned in the Versorgerin#136,3 however, many more were discovered – and a few initiated – along the way. We collected stories embedded in the infrastructure in the Kirchengasse 4 and documented the values and the ideals of many networks of initiatives hosted by and collaborating with servus and AMRO.
In that phase, ReARDC was conceptualized and the urgent/relevant needs were chosen to be addressed in the project. The reconstruction of the VM system of ARDC and its integration into the server cluster had priority – and overlapped with a long awaited restructuring of the cluster and the urge to reduce energy consumption due to energy crisis. As mentioned, core.servus.at & radical-openness had to be updated due to the expiring version of Drupal. And in addition to this, it felt relevant to accompany the web-development with an investigation on the community and its projects to better understand what structures were still needed.
The questions of architecture and design for the websites have been guided by reflections on how to represent the different identities and practices of the almost 300 members. The project aimed to present faithfully not only the ecosystem of practices shared between the servus and the amro communities, but also the coexistence of the toolbox, the datacenter and the experimental VPS, and finally the projects that servus produces in collaboration with others.
Therefore, we observed and analyzed the many websites hosting content and projects by servus. We also went through our lists of members, scrolling their websites and interviewing some of them, mapping the several directions where our community spans and is active, trying to isolate in the project conceptual elements that respected such variety. Additionally, a survey was distributed among the members to start mapping their activities, their motivations and wishes, and which parts of infrastructure they were using.4
One relevant feedback from the inquiry was that many members did not know each other and only imagined who is also in the network. And that a way of contacting each other and engaging with the community as a whole did not really exist. Out of such reflections, it seemed important to create a space that would make the members of the community visible and give space to the current topics of work/research and the resulting projects. The website was named galaxy.servus.at and it comprises an interactive visualization of the members, their practices and their values connected into constellations. The map is enhanced with a discussion platform for the whole community, based on the Discourse forum to exchange information and calls for collaboration, reachable at clusters.servus.at.
The research also provided important hints for the production of the websites core.servus.at and radical-openness.org, which were finally updated and completed over summer and fall 2024. Here the front-end was simplified and made more immediate to navigate. Concluding the exploration phase, it became visible that the process on how servus and AMRO came to be occupied with an important role in the ReARDC project and that this was an opportunity to make visible again conversations and stories that were discovered along the way.
This brought us to the final stage of the ReARDC, that was the production of the “Artist Running Data Centers” publication. The publication is a collection of interviews with some of the main actors from the context of the servus.at association and the communities or radical net cultures surrounding AMRO. The publication does not aim at being a coherent story, but to present various narrations and point of views, featuring a selection of projects from members and wider community that were circulating, but not structurally documented yet.
In addition to the aforementioned interview with Manu Luksch on the concept of art servers and what they can be today, the publication features several actors from the scene of media art and self hosters that surrounded servus since its beginning. We discussed with Franz Xaver and Christoph Nebel about the media art practices and needs before the explosion of net culture initiatives in the 90s and with Didi Kressnig how servus started out of the context of the Stadtwerkstatt. Aileen Derieg narrates how the other Linz network “Eliot” came to be and how its domains moved to servus.at after Elliot had to close.
We collected stories around Art Meets Radical Openness festival, involving the founder Ushi Reiter and the long time cooperation partners Christoph Nebel – department of Time Based Media of the Linz University of Arts and Thomas Warwaris from the Linzer Linux User Group, who is now part of the board of servus.at.
All of this provided the ground and the context where the Artist Run Data Centers formed – in a conversation with the long time servus sys admin Peter Wagenhuber we talk how the whole servus data center changed and grew by answering the needs of its community and the ARDC was also an answer for a specific need. Also the exchange with Tanja Brandmayr and Claus Harringer deepens the cooperation of artistic practice and technical needs that are at the ground of the idea of autonomous infrastructures, something that defines the collaboration between Stadtwerkstatt and servus since its beginnings.
Finally, we collected inputs from seven projects of the ARDC contextualizing the different artistic positions and interesting aspects how the various experimental data centers operate. The server admin collective LURK talks about their style and motivations in running community infrastructure, especially how new alliances with collectives working on social justice and ecological mattes renews the discourse around F/LOSS. Kam0 and Chae – the Draw it with others working group – gave context to the most recent ARDC project, Scatter Chatter, a research framework dedicated to the exploration of server- and smartphone-mediated interaction between people. Also the VPS by Vo Ezn /vɔ ɪzn/, deals with the interaction between user and server, however in this project the focus is on the dynamics of exploitation and burnout of both human and machine. The trans*feminist collective In-Grid contributed to the publication with their Femfester Server Manifesto grounded on the metaphor of festering, frictions and leaking. The VPS operated by Inari Wishiki is an experimental space to test modalities of interaction among users and citizens, however with focus on (un)making items and with the creation of value within production networks. Inari is also part of irational.org, a server collective that is extending the idea of the ARDC with a non-virtual-machine project. They namely administer a physical single-board computer installed in the server room hosting the digital infrastructure of the group.
The conversation with long time AMRO community member Aymeric Mansoux covers several aspects on the past 20 years of collective infrastructures, from the scene of the early 2000s and the trajectories of GOTO10 and then Bleu255 – and their VPS at servus –, to the emergence of corporate social media and the current trends of big tech, who disrupted much of the critical art practices and theories grounded on autonomy and experimental networks. The exchange highlights also worsening of the work-life conditions in society, which is particularly visible in the exploitation of cultural workers that operate critically to an academic/commercial art practice. We conclude with a positive tone however, observing how out of this struggle we can notice strong political engagement emerging and the creation of new alliances between autonomous infrastructure projects and other fields of action, from feminist to environmental activism to social justice and decolonial movements, which challenge classic notions of openness and bring (back, or finally) the server practices into the realm of politics. The publication is enriched by a Critical Glossary compiled by joak (Joseph Knierzinger) and Riviera Taylor that help navigate technical terms and network modalities distributed all over the publication.
For the ReARDC the conclusion of production is not the end of the project, the activities will continue with the servus community will actually start now, and dedicated community work is envisioned for the upcoming years in the newly installed Discourse server at https://galaxy.servus.at/connect. The forum is already active and will be actively promoted to involve the servus community in it and use it as a platform to grow and forge new cooperations and alliances.