Soft Data and Common Wares Residency: README_Paz-Server.txt by Mark A. Hernandez Motaghy
README_Paz-Server.txt
This README file has been released and reformatted from the Paz-Hernandez family intranet with the consent of its current sysadmin, Mark.
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Paz Server v.2024.07
Last update: 8:41 PM ET, 11/02/2024
Note
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File always in progress. Paz Server is a trans-local, offline family database configured in the present and alive in the future. Server v.2024.07 houses the oral histories of Nena and Tía Martha. Its ongoing configurations are contingent on its situatedness in the family LAN/dscape across Chumash, Tongva, and Chichimeca territories, or so called [REDACTED], Los Angeles, California and [REDACTED], Colima, Mexico.
Genealogy
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The previous model, v.2022.10, also referred to as Serv/ir, contains Nena's recipes and the poem "Distant Company (Con Pan)."[1] Recipes remain on the Local Area Network (LAN) while it serves the poem to external requests. The web server was sewn directly onto Mama Genia's servilleta.
"How do you plan to prevent this project from being commodified?" This question was posed by Geri Augusto, a scholar and activist working at the intersection of knowledge politics and practices, when Mark first publicly presented this model at MIT. Future iterations continue to address this question.
Img: Serv/ir Configuration (images/serv-ir_congif-1.jpg)
Ref: Servilleta Server Channel (https://www.are.na/mark-hm/proj-servilleta-servers)
Mama Genia
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The day after their first solo show, Mark wrote a letter to Mama Genia, informing her that he would include her name in the show credits. The show title would read "Looking in a Circle, In a Circle of Clouds by Mark A. Hernandez Motaghy & Eugenia 'Mama Genia' Paz."[2]
While Mama Genia might have been proud of the installation, or at least the efforts made by her great-grandson, it's likely she would have had some pointed critiques. She might have questioned the decision to display her textiles as art objects and the choice of venue: a sterile, white-cube gallery hidden in an undergrad dorm's basement. Mark pictured her entering the space and raising an eyebrow at the academic jargon in the show's opening paragraphs[3]—though this might be a projection of Mark's own insecurities about overvaluing institutional knowledge. Mark and Mama Genia would share a silent understanding that this whole endeavor was just an excuse for Mark to configure a network with the women who raised them.
Image: Mama Genia Servilleta Dtl (images/mama-genia-servilleta-03-dtl.jpg)
Login Set-up
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[REDACTED]
Servilleta Remix
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In the center of the DXARTS Gallery, displayed on a table before one of Mama Genia's hand-embroidered fabrics, lay Mark's reinterpretation of her family heirloom. As one of the self-designated family archivists, as someone who recollects stories, they reinterpreted her servilleta with three additional components: 1) a computer server storing oral histories of her daughters' migration to the U.S., 2) an amplifier to output these stories, and 3) conductive sewing thread acting as a fabric speaker.
Our v.2024.07 components serve as a relay between craft and data, twining what we share, how we are shared, into an autonomous circuit that transmutes patterns into fragmented memories we can remember again.
Image: Looking in a Circle, In a Circle of Clouds 01 (images/paz-server_uw-install-01.jpg)
Image: Looking in a Circle, In a Circle of Clouds 02 (images/paz-server_spiral-speaker-dtl.jpg)
Servilleta Housing
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1. Raspberry Pi 4 sewn into servilleta fabric
|2. YunoHost installed on Pi to manage oral histories repository[4]
3. Audio output from Pi connected to a compact amplifier board
4. Rechargeable lithium-ion battery powers the amplifier
5. Amplified signals transmitted via conductive thread network in fabric
6. Fabric speaker sewn with spiral pattern using conductive thread
7. Neodymium magnet placed beneath the conductive thread design
8. Amplifier board directly interfaced with conductive thread in fabric speaker
9. Electromagnetic interaction between amplifier and conductive thread
10. Encrypted messages are sewn atop the speaker in punto de cruz.
Image: Paz Server Annotated Drawing (images/paz-speaker_dwg-annotated-1.jpg)
Image: Paz Server Fabric Speaker Alt (images/paz-speaker_dwg-alt.jpg)
Ref: Magnetic Field; How A Speaker Works (https://www.are.na/block/2824779000
Ref: Kobakant, Fabric Speaker Properties (https://www.are.na/block/28247761)
Orientation
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After the show, someone asked Mark if it all worked—if they could hear their aunties speak through the patterns their great grandmother had sewn. The answer was "not yet." However, as important as it was to hear this story cloth speak, they recognized that its value extended beyond just "working." Paz Server serves as a “homing device”[5]—a mechanism for orienting us back toward the lines that were given upon our family's histories of arrival.
Ongoing concerns for our (dis/non) orientation: What is the function of a homing device, or in this case, a homing circuit? How does this notion apply to an intra- and inter- generational framework? To what degree does any of this "work" when operating inside a white cube gallery tabula rasa setting, one that serves to provide non-orientation?
¡All future configurations of Paz Server will not work in a white cube. It will refuse to transmit. It is not safe in a white box. It is technologically autonomous.[6] It is epistemologically opaque![7]
Image: Looking in a Circle, In a Circle of Clouds 03 (images/paz-server_uw-install-03.jpg)
Net Diagram
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At its conception, Paz Server was primarily concerned with what went into the server: our intimate data. The project diagrammatically resembled this: servilleta → server (material culture configuring gathering online).
During a studio visit with Ricardo Alzati a year later, we realized we had not yet considered how the servilleta might respond to the server. This realization prompted us to invert the project's diagram: servilleta ← server (gathering online re/configuring material culture).
Model v.2024.07 explores how this web server could be in dialogue with the fibers housing it, i.e., how might the database refigure the material and cultural function of an heirloom cloth? A reciprocal relationship between inheritance and our network would involve the following: servilleta ←→ server (relay between gathering(s) & material culture).
Kin
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Shout out to our fellow kin servers, intranets, and sysadmins—Rosa, Solar Protocol, Janastu, CowDe.Net, to name a few. The University of Washington DXArts community has also helped us think about alternative techno futures and “intermediate scale networks.”[8] Our co-conspiration has reassured us once again that a network emerges from deeply situated nodes. AI cannot predict these bonds. AI can not become nodal. AI image generators are merely glossy representational tools. Glossy can be useful. But what good is our network if it cannot be sustained?
Ref: Vernacular Clouds Workshop Channel (https://www.are.na/mark-hm/workshop-vernacular-clouds-uw)
System Stewardship
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Mark is the current sysadmin, but Mama Genia is the service provider. There's the real motherboard, “Born multi-tasking and multithreading, she has protected memory and she won't grant you access privileges… She laughs at your binary code”[9] Who did you think was figuring out how shit goes together?
Servilleta and server share the same root: to serve. Sysadmin is net/work, labor often rendered invisible. As our dear Semine Long-Callesen once observed, anything that genuinely connects us with ourselves and others without serving patriarchy and capitalism is most often dismissed. Configuring a feminist server can be a rehearsal of what it means "to serve," challenging its loaded meanings of gendered, class-based work and reconstituting practices of sharing and being shared. But it takes work, and as Ukeles taught us, the work will be the work.
Mark is reevaluating whether they can commit to the work as a stewarding sysadmin. This reevaluation calls into question the reasons Mark had to explain the decline of their health in the letter they wrote to Mama Genia and why Mark needed to write this first draft while squatting in an apartment.[10] They are remembering now that this project was never about novel technological devices but mechanisms for being reoriented home. A sysadmin/steward cannot become an atomized node and be processed by the art market. In the networks of their own desire, they must be multi-nodal.
Technofuturos
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The clouds sketch us in their manner
As we sketch the clouds in our manner.
XX
-Paz
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[1] "Distant Company (Con Pan)" was published in the early servilleta-server-archive-experiment prototypes. In it, Mark describes how Nena, Mama Genia's daughter, demonstrates the formation of a circle within a circle using a servilleta bordada to shape the masa. While forming concentric circles, Mama Nena reminisces about Papa Pancho, recalling his ability to speak a native language and his attire, specifically white cloth attire called calzón de manta. President Porfirio Díaz, in his efforts to modernize Mexico, viewed these native trousers as a sign of economic and social backwardness, leading to their prohibition in 1887.
One of Mama Genia's servilletas Mark inherited was repurposed from the same manta fabric. Each concentric circle on the story cloth represents an accumulation of memories. The cloth's unraveling is an undoing that serves as both preservation and futurity, reinterpreting the past to envision our direction in the face of modernity's promises.
[2] Mark wrote two more letters afterward: one to their brother, Ku, and the other to the children of Gaza. They were invited to grieve and write letters by Derek Dizon, the steward of A Resting Place Seattle, which is a grassroots community grief support center located in Seattle's historic Chinatown-International District. There is a Resting Place Seattle GoFundMe to help keep the space operating.
[3] The opening paragraphs of Looking in a Circle, In a Circle of Clouds description read as follows:
“This show reexamines our relationship to the internet, particularly its material matter, starting with web servers. The range of our digital intimacy, shared across various social platforms, ultimately ends up stored on a remote server owned by a private company. (Mandeville, 2021).
The work delves into the social and material intra- and inter-relations within DIY networks hosted on a local server. It reconsiders communication networks from the grassroots. It questions how to move beyond corporate data clouds and monopolistic service providers.
The title originates from Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s self-reflexive notion, “I am looking in a circle, in a circle of gazes,” where she considers how to register the past and present in resistance to Western logic. Through the lens of such autonomy and self-representation, the work delves into the self-reliance of community networks and their role in stewarding personal/collective archives. In other words, how might the nodes of a network emerge from local modes of production?”
4] For more information about hosting a Raspberry Pi server, see Mark’s blog post "The Art of Co-Hosting," School for Poetic Computation, 2024.
[5] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 2006.
[6] REDES A.C., La autonomía tecnológica como constelación de experiencias, 2021.
[7] We thank our friend Maya Acharya for the term epistemic opacity.
[8] In his article "The Organic Internet: Building Communications Networks from the Grassroots," Panayotis Antoniadis argues that local solutions are as relevant to the future as they are to the past, especially when rethinking "The Cloud." Antoniadis asserts that numerous intermediate options exist between the two extremes of personal and global clouds. These can include clouds for neighborhoods, districts, or cities, as well as those shared by specific groups like cooperatives. We build on Panayotis' work to consider how each local configuration, particularly in the Global South, has its techno-vernaculars that can determine how the hardware and data are stewarded, managed, and accessed.
At the University of Washington DXArts space, Mark held a speculative workshop called "Vernacular Clouds." This workshop explored alternative approaches to communication networks from a grassroots perspective, challenging corporate data clouds and monopolistic service providers. They questioned how these "intermediate option" networks might make local data matters intersect with local material culture. Participants designed the network architecture of a personal, autonomous grassroots network and translated them into Midjourney prompts. They questioned how network components might develop from local knowledge systems and material culture. Their goal was to use Midjourney not for imagining a distant future, but to "mine the near present."
[9] Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, TECH-ILLA SUNRISE.
[10] While Mark wrote the first draft of this README file, they were squatting in Boston's North End due to overwhelming medical bills. They had received access to the apartment through [REDACTED]. Mark now has secure housing and can resume this work..
