It’s been a while. 2018 was quite busy and we’ve been working on other projects. Pivilion is still going strong with continuous support from Akademie Schloss Solitude, where the project was started as part of the Schlosspost Web Residency, and where we currently reside IRL as part of the 2018-2019 Web Based Media fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.

Over the year we’ve made some changes and bugfixes on the Pivilion Gitlab site and are planning to do a major overhaul of the gallery system very soon.

About the research

We’re collaborating with 16 (and counting) international artists who we’ve supplied with Raspberry Pis, and helped install their own Pivilion systems. It’s up to them to setup their own work on those systems and distribute it through their channels, offer to sell it, give it away or trade it – and in the process communicate with us what they would expect from such a system. It’s our goal to give digital artists an insight into the functioning of the [free / libre] server ecosystem, and to enable them to use open systems and protocols rather then services to distribute their work. In the end of this stage (which should happen by the end of 2019) we would have some comprehensive insight on the feasibility of such a system.

In the meantime, and very soon, we will present our collaborators’ work and their views on the subject on Schlosspost. So hang on tight because more content is coming. 🙂

Why

It’s only natural to ask why such an insane system, running on pocket PCs with less power then current flagship smartphones and on top of a really slow network like Tor is necessary. With so many free [as in beer, not speech] options available to host and distribute work online, why would one go through the trouble of setting everything up and end up with a slow server that’s hard to access..? There are several reasons.

1) Knowledge [distribution] is important – our aim isn’t to provide a silver bullet solution to current and future problems of the dystopian internet – but to enable discourse and share knowledge

2) Decentralization – a purely technical reason – the option of “piggybacking” onto [public] WiFi for hosting that the Pis and Tor provide in tandem is essential for ultimate decentralization, “squatting” current infrastructure without leaving a trace

3) Software freedom – both Tor and Raspbian [Pi’s operating system] – are free software, enabling distribution of any modifications that come to life as part of this project / research

Hope this makes it more clear what we’re up to, expect more soon, back to making an overhaul of the generator