Circulations is a server hosted in the Constant Galaxy. It was started in 2023 as a space of online experimentation dedicated to the continuous publication efforts of Constant. This includes hosting:
Constant has developed a long practice of collection of materials to be used as sources for small publications and for the documentation of these activities. We find it important that these materials are made available to all the participants and other interested people, which means to care for the maintenance in the long-term, and to try ways of redistributing the materials for re-use by others.
All the materials are made available under the CC4R conditions, unless otherwise mentioned. CC4R is a document which orients the way in which we approach collaboration and how we imagine and desire sharing and re-use to happen.
Splinter is our travelling local server that gets activated in workshops and worksessions. It responds to two different needs / desire we had: first of all the urge to keep away from cloud-based corporate extractive platforms for the sharing of our files and notes, secondly the desire to materialize the infrastructure we would use to document a situation as something visible and touchable, in the very same place. This curious presence in the room allows users to get closer to the server they are using, to try things in an environment where it is easier to experiment without fear of messing up stable systems.
At Constant we have a long standing practice of questioning and finding alternative ways of documentation processes that are collaborative in nature, which resulted in many iterations and variations of local servers. Previous work on these questions can be read about in the first issue of the Networks of One’s Own series, which describes the Etherbox system that Constant has used from 2018 to 2023.
And this practice is not developed by Constant alone, it’s rather an on-going conversation with others around us, such as VARIA and X-PUB in Rotterdam. A collective effort with such neighbouring networks resulted for example in the Rosa server, can be read about in the collective publication ATNOFS - A traversal network of feminist servers.
Well… at the present moment there is no ready-to-use version, nor an in-detail manual on how to reproduce Splinter. While we would definitely be interested to see many variations of this sort of system done by others, learning from previous attempts we are being careful with the promise of an easily reproducible system-in-a-box.
As you can read in the NOOO’s Etherbox issue, we did in that case propose guides and files to reproduce a local server for your situations and projects. But what we learned in that case is that specific guides and systems can have a reduced life-span, in the sense that the 5 year old code of etherbox would not work anymore without some adaptations the current hardware and software. We then realized the continuous effort that is necessary to maintain a system with the promise that it can be reproduced without the technical understanding of its individual components.
We don’t have at the moment the capacity at Constant to sustain the require continuous attention to the project, code-reviews, support and manual updates that would be necessary to offer a reproducible splinter. On the other hand, the etherbox manual is a good place to start, and we are happy to pass on knowledge collected so-far and things learned in these past years, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you are busy with or interested in this sort of systems!
Splinter the machine: For the moment, Splinter, the physical device that can travel and be put in your backpack/coat, is an Olimex microcomputer with Debian Bullseye installed. We choose Olimex for the longevity of the chips (Allwinner) and the Bulgarian Olimex company choice for Open Hardware. Apart from that, Splinter has etherpad lite installed for pads to do collective writing. It also runs Nginx webserver as we want as much “services” as possible to go through the browser. This includes uploading images and other files. Etherdump is installed, this indexes the pads and gives a listed overview of what has been written and permits different exports of the pads to be rendered.
Splinter has a wireless router called Splintnet to go with it, connected to Splinter with the internet. Splintnet takes the network calculation burden off the Olimex. The router handles giving out ip addresses to the computers connecting to the device, so they can both connect to the internet and to Splinter directly if you are in the same room. The router is also essential for the DNS1 trick. It’s flashed with Open wrt
Connecting to Splinter: On the Constant server we have TINC installed. On Splinter the device TINC2 is installed as well. Both instances of TINC are necessary to create the tunnel connecting the devices. To connect to Splinter, we go to a url, https://circulations.constantvzw.org/ this is where the DNS trick is necessary.
The DNS system is one of the fundamental infrastructures of the Internet, used to connect IP addresses to Domain names (what connects the URL constantvzw.org to the “internet address” 79.99.201.131). More specific, when you are connected to the local network in a collective situation in which we use Splinter, circulations.constantvzw.org will be detoured to the local IP address of the Splinter server (10.9.8.7), but if you connect to the same address from another place, it will go to the Constant server located in a data center in Diegem (79.99.201.131). The DNS trick we use allows us to have the same url for materials that will move through the circulations structure allowing different modes of access.
For example if you manage to create a fully obscure diagram of how this works, or maybe a more comprehensive image of it, and you upload it on the Splinter server during a worksession, it can be accessed at the same URL whether it is reached via the local network during the session, or it is reached via the VPN from a remote location. When eventually the content of the live Splinter server will be moved to the static documentation achive the same url will still work. Depending on how you are connecting to Splinter, different bacground colours will indicate if you are accessing locally or through the world wide web.
In the background, the navigation is differently wired to ensure we will navigate to the same url, even though it is accessed differently, and even it is moved to a different server. This might feel like some invisible manipulation that makes it difficult to understand where something is. And it is, in fact this is in an extremely small and artisanal scale how all the corporate services running on the Internet have been designed to operate. This means for Google to have hundreds of different datacenters and be able to redirect its users to different machines, while they are going to the same link. This corporate large scale approach to the question has been then made available As-A-Service too, in the form of Content Delivery Networks.
We see how useful it is for companies to use such systems to make their user experience seamless, accessible, economically efficient. We do it instead for long-term content reliability, to open up access from/to different locations. With our local server approach we chose not to use internet cloud services and such to keep our data but, later, we also realized we wanted to make use of the internet to regain some of the agency to be able to share our content.
Splinter is a fluid entity that we hope we can continue to morph into different versions along the documentation path that constant takes.
“The Hub” was a system introduced by Aymeric Mansoux at XPUB in 2018. The idea of a TINC-based VPN to allow various network experiments within increasingly restricted institutional settings was part of the strategy of Aymeric to deploy a shadow IT infrastructure as core element of XPUB. The setup was used by students to host project websites, learn about Linux sysadmin, host the XPUB bootleg library, etc. This creative use of VPN was introduced to Aymeric in the mid 00s by Tom Schouten when the two were members of the GOTO10 collective. At GOTO10, OpenVPN became routinely used for distributed streaming experiments, nomadic web servers hosted on laptops, various tunnels, internal IRC networks, radio and VoIP services for the collective, as well as facilitating remote access to art installations and machines of all kinds. The documentation of the setup at XPUB was started by Angeliki Diakrousi, and improved on by André Castro. In 2020 Roel Roscam Abbing started a hub for his interaction design students at Malmö, to create a hybrid setup of web servers and GPIO input/output interactions across several Raspberry Pis. Eventually Peter Gonda improved the original XPUB tinc setup, and Manetta Berends further consolidated the documentation, notably as part of deploying and experimenting with Jupyter notebooks for the course. TINC was also installed on rosa, and rosa’s documentation formed the basis of the zine on TINC. The zine is part of the trajectory of ServPub, an experimental site for research and practice on experimental and computational publishing, thinking collectively about affective infrastructures, minor tech and autonomous networks within, and beyond, institutional constraints. Their research process and how to is documented here: https://git.systerserver.net/queer/networks
