reSync visited transmediale 14: afterglow’s art hack day: “Afterglow” is a collaboration between Art Hack Day, LEAP Berlin and transmediale. As coders we fear the ‘legacy’ system, a piece of old junk we haven’t yet figured out how to throw away. As artists, we’re tempted by prolific outbursts of freshness and novelty; more art of less value. Businesses and government crave more data, more connections, more context. By embracing these impulses without contemplation we perpetuate the technological hype cycle and unintentionally shorten the half-life of our artefacts. Technology has become akin to a natural resource, generating physical and immaterial waste that is appropriated in such diverse contexts as e-garbage dumps, big data businesses and mass surveillance schemes. As such, trash is no longer what is just left behind but is central to our post-digital lives. When digital detritus piles up it decomposes, giving rise to a post-digital afterglow with the potential for new expression and new enterprise. Can we make peace with our excessive data flows and their inevitable obsolescence? Can we find nourishment in waste, overflow and excess? Can the afterglow of perpetual decay illuminate us?” (Art Hack Day 2014)

From the 15th till the 18th of January we participated in the Taking Care of Things Meeting at the Stadtarchiv Lüneburg Germany. This was also the closing event for the Post Media Lab Incubator project at Leuphana University and our research fellowship with them. See the documentation here.

The visit began with a tour of the city archive during which we heard about the main activities of the institution not least the film, map and image collections. They wish to extend access to these via street access sync points in the near future.

We convened one of seven care groups Mesh Media! to look at open, collaborative systems that facilitate collective abilities to store, curate, share, edit, redistribute and re-purpose media while at the same time creating new frames of reference and practice in public. We were pleased to have presentations by Eric Kluitenberg of Tactical Media Files, Volker Grassmuck and Jan Torge of ‘InternetTV for the newMedia Generation’ Grundversorgung, open wireless network advocates Freifunk Lueneburg and Robert Ochshorn with Interlace. (See last section for more details..)

Media was selected from the respective archives and uploaded to publicly presented syncronisation points adjacent to each Freifunk node in Lueneburg city centre.

We produced a map to illustrate the locations of syncronisation points as a  data trail which was toured by a small group of Lueneburg locals. They were encouraged to scan the QRcode posters and NFC tags they found on the street first connecting to Freifunk wireless then activating the BTsync to distribute the images and films.

Please try these BTsyncs yourself 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12 – or get the set! confused ? see the howTo..

The post-medial is not tied to any particular modality of media, neither to “new” or “old”, “digital” or “analog”, nor to “connected” or “offline”. Nevertheless it relies on new medial affordances (what? affordances! :-)) and possibilities, allowing for new kinds of collective repositories and living archives. How can these new collecitve, transitory and ad-hoc repositories of ‘many media’ look like? What are their (possible) protocols of turning consumers into makers, individuals into groups, and media into structured, living and meaningful (micro-)social memory? What are possible assemblages that withstand idiosyncrasy and expert-ism, but are ‘avant-garde’ and progressive in form and function nevertheless?