Toward a Minor Tech:FeministServers-500

Feminist Federating

mara karagianni, ooooo, nate wessalowski, vo ezn

A feminist server is an emancipating space, where we - queer, non-binary and women identified sysadmins - develop and share our technical skills and care for our bodies, machines and tools through fluid processes. Instead of thinking in terms of a purely technical architecture, in this context a server becomes an affective infrastructure organizing the relations that form around it.

Situated and often precarious, they [the server] subvert normative expectations around scalability while posing questions of how (not) to relate and become allies. Like all technologies, servers are not neutral and the concept of a 'service' disguises invisible (and often feminized and racialized care) labor as well as environmental damage. Feminist servers by contrast not only set out to queering binary gendered or other violent and oppressive tech language but also to the production of horizontal peer relations by imagining alternative roles of responsibilities and care-based approaches to technologies.

The affective infrastructure set up through and alongside our servers is volunteer-based, with sysadmin contribution depending on our availability and capacity. For the longest time the expenses for material and maintenance were covered through income from events, donations and from the members' own financial contributions. This changed when we decided to seek out funding for the realization of a feminist video streaming platform in 2021. Awarded with a project-based grant, we installed, configured and customized a self-hosted instance of peertube, a free software video platform. Peertube forms part of a decentralized environment of federated social media called the ‘Fediverse’. Instances can form a federation through a common network protocol which enables the display of videos through each others' platforms. To make it habitable we organized a "digital maquillage" worksession to queer the default interface, and defined a set of shared guidelines and terms of use that resonated with our technopolitical agendas and desires. With our platform the feminist servers opened up their affective infrastructure to seek out critical connections with other feminists and collectives through artistic online residencies.

From the beginning, questions regarding the continuation of the platform and its maintenance as well as longterm availability of the video material were at stake. While we were asked to serve our extensive community and host more and more videos, expanding the platform seemed like a self-exploitative and unsustainable scenario. Thus instead of taking up more and more responsibility as a 'single point of service' and adopting the naturalized logic of 'scaling it up', we decided to explore different paths.

360 degrees of proximities is our way of experimenting with a protocol of feminist federation, embodying networks of trust and solidarity. Starting in 2023, and facilitated by another art fund, we work together with feminist, queer communities empowering them to build their own video platforms autonomously but in a joint effort. Through processes of collective learning and knowledge transmission this will foster a network of platforms to eventually become habitable and interconnected affective infrastructures in themselves.