A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers – On communism and mysticism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (ATNOFS) is a collaborative project formed around intersectional feminist, ecological servers. Understanding servers as computers that host space and services for communities around them, this project exists inside, and in between, roaming servers and different networks. Our decentralized programme will occur in 5 locations (The Netherlands, Belgium, Romania, Greece, Austria) with the collaboration of 6 partners (Varia, LURK, Constant, HYPHA, Feminist Hack Meetings, and ESC).
In the first session, hosted in Varia, we will focus on tools and methods to make space for understanding what feminist publishing infrastructures could be. During the weekend of March 26 and 27, we will be experimenting with publishing infrastructures. The tools and methods that will emerge can later be used for further knowledge sharing as the project moves location and the programme evolves.
The session in Varia will kick-off with a public radio broadcast on the evening of Wednesday the 23rd of March. For this broadcast, we will be joined by two practitioners who have been working on and around feminist and activist servers: Spideralex and Danae Tapia.
Spideralex will share about her personal story/travel/trip towards feminist infrastructure, how she started becoming interested in building her own digital infrastructure, joining lorea/n-1 (federated social networks) and then calafou (a material infrastructure, social lodging cooperative and rehabilitating an old industrial colony) and the gaps and the need to create feminist servers, as well as the main changes over the last 10 years regarding critical digital feminist infrastructure and feminist infrastructure in general. Danae will address the paradoxical relation of communist dialectical materialism and mysticism.
Spideralex is a cyberfeminist. She founded the Donestech collective which explores the relationship between gender and technology. She coordinated the international network “The gender and technology Institutes”, which developed training to include gender in digital security for women human rights defenders and LGTIQ activists. She is the editor of two volumes on the panorama of technological sovereignty initiatives. She also supports feminist infrastructure initiatives such as feminist servers. In her free time she organises feminist futurotopias workshops. Her recent work includes investigating and creating a feminist helpline for providing support to people facing GBVO (see: https://www.digitaldefenders.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/VMD_EN.pdf, https://www.digitaldefenders.org/feministhelplines/, https://fembloc.cat/).
Danae Tapia is a writer, multimedia artist and technologist born in the Chilean working class. She is a researcher and lecturer of Hacking and Autonomous Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She is the founder of The Digital Witchcraft Institute, an arts organization registered in the Chamber of Commerce of The Netherlands. This venture was Danae’s project for her fellowship with the Mozilla Foundation which started as an artistic-research experience dedicated to collect and showcase advanced non-conforming approaches to the use of tech. To the present day, The Digital Witchcraft Institute has executed a series of projects that fall at the intersection of posthuman technology, deep migrations and climate justice. This work has been funded by several international foundations.
http://varia.zone/en/atnofs-varia.html