Online -- the Server

Praise the independent server!

We sustain our own independent server. With a goal to keep art and culture free from industry and politics and to focus on the collaboration possibilities that the internet can provide us with, we created and run our own flexible infrastructure and develop and share tools in this medium. Our server, as a nest, allows us to converge the diversity of approaches and activities of everyone involved with OKNO. Here, all parallel projects, heterogeneous actions, attempts, failures, and temporary artifacts are gathered together. The Server also binds together whatever we do inside in center and what we grow outside in the garden. This is a space for learning, combining and recycling programming languages, sound, image, text and generated data.

some years before

Some of us were there when the internet opened up to the commercial world. A response came from the too short lived internet activists who opposed the rising mercantile hegemony, and their ruthless take over of online design. Web art in its first versions took the provided tools as weapons to expose this. Open source and other free tools developed, but not without a warning. Above all, the idea that art and culture has to remain free from industry and politics remained. To safeguard experimentation. The freedom of speech and creativity. To keep the dream. To evolve into whatever creativity is urging it.

a dream

OKNO in its childhood years, decided to get its own infrastructure. After all these years, the evolution of making art in networks had not stopped. These days we see the blunt takeover of facebook, secondlife, youtube and alikes, offering slick comfort in return for your data. We believe that the development of tools has to start not from making money with mass communication but from collaboration and real interaction, strong and silly ideas, only creative purposes, and with hard experimental concepts. A free and independent server should provide the possibility to work on that, and to bring artists and other technologists together.

back to the garden of algorithm

These days the server is the locus where we nest. The sedimentary as well as the migrating boids. It allows us to make a convergent series of points in the diversity of approaches and activities of each of us involved. It brings all the parallell projects, the heterogenous actions, the try-outs and failures, and the dispersed snippets of temporary artefacts together. It binds whatever we do inside in the house (eating drinking sleeping working thinking creating crying dancing), with what we grow outside in the garden (the same things but in a different dress).

swarm, fly and crash strategically

Proud of our calculated but natural space, happily traveling through the fiber optics of the network, and thinking of how to bring about some beauty, we believe we have to build tools, as part of the new materials artists nowadays use, with programming languages' recyclage and waste, with found and generated spikes of sound and image. Get a connection and kick the packages till they critically hurt. And make us think! Enjoy new radically art, virtually alive! Let's invite the others in, and let's invent a new network of independent art servers, bottom up and free, and without commercials.