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Control your own cloud
co-commission by Arnolfini/Artefact Festival.
unCloud is an application that enables anyone with a laptop to create an open wireless network and distribute their own information.
unCloud is launched as part of the Artefact festival exhibition at STUK kunstencentrum, Leuven, Belgium (14-23 Feb 2012), alongside Antisocial Notworking, a project from 2008, that presents a critique of the social media canon through an open repository and featured projects that each negate the various social media monopolies of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.. For the festival, the unCloud software allows the repository to be experienced in a way that endorses its critique of centralized network services.
More info/documentation can be found at www.intk.com/uncloud.
The proliferation of social networking and current developments in service-based platforms (what has become known as 'cloud computing') provide explicit examples of the privatization and commodification of social production. What becomes clear is that our experience of the web is bound to inherent paradoxes that are reflected in its technical organization. One of the foundations for its critique relies on the recognition of the ways in which the energies of peer production and social exchange have been expropriated from the commons by the market.
