Let’s make our own internets! This workshop explores the differences and similarities between the Internet and a bunch of computers connected by cables. The aim is to start a conversation about how to imagine networking beyond conventional global communication infrastructures and the relations of power they evoke. By connecting our laptops to each other, we will see how any computer can be turned into a server, a node in a network. Through this basic exercise we start to develop a situated knowledge of the networks we use. It performs a direct approach to the communication technology we use everyday without much reflection.

The workshop is a first prototype for A Colony of Networks, a project that wants to experiment and experience forms of networking that are local and self-managed, and that can use the (future) urban space of Baia Mare as a platform.

Workshop mediated by:

– Dick Reckard [BE/NL/IT], researches the undefined territory in-between technology, politics and art
– Femke Snelting [BE/NL], develops projects at the intersection of design, feminism and Free Software
– Alex Zakkas [NL/GR], is interested in people’s ways of getting along and around the structures that they have to deal with daily. He uses any media sensitive to the situation at hand and specific to its context of representation

(In the context of the Baia Mare candidature for European Cultural Capital 2021)