Why would one need a small battery-powered device that can host image galleries from any place in the world with an available WiFi Internet connection?
The idea came to life during Dina’s residency in net.cube at G-MK in Zagreb. She had her own web project (probably down after the event) that required hosting on a local network during a presentation. The Raspberry Pi seemed ideal for the project. We wanted to make the project accessible from the Internet and for that we needed to circumvent closed incoming ports that disallowed us from running services from inside the gallery. Tor hidden services pretty much do that out-of-the box. The rest seemed logical – I powered up one of hacklab01’s RPis and first made it a web server. Then installed Tor and set it up – the whole thing just worked and the setup didn’t take up much time at all.
That got us thinking – this could come in handy – one could host a website from their pocket – completely anonymously – from their school, favorite bar or from a bank queue – all they would need is a RPi device, a battery and an USB wifi dongle. But why stop there – why just host a plain website when you can create a darknet gallery system…
The whole concept started to come together – why not teach people how to build their own devices and host their own little pocket galleries. And pack it up nicely so that it’s simple to setup and not so difficult to customize. Mozilla’s together.js fit right into the story – as we wanted to recreate the gallery / exhibition experience, not just content presentation – there’s plenty of that around available online already – but the whole experience of visiting a place, moving around it with other people, talking to them (or ignoring them), etc…
The project stared gathering dust on an SD card on a shelve and that’s when we saw the First Schlosspost Web Residency open call. What could be more on the topic of art decentralization then a bunch of nomadic galleries hosted on pocket devices around the world on a network that’s anonymous and runs on worldwide network of community-hosted nodes?
