aquacomms
Internet as Community Infrastructure
I spent the first months of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York hyper-aware of how the internet held us together while the virus kept us physically apart. While school, work, social services, and commerce all relocated to virtuality, in Bushwick we know based on Bushwick Ayuda Mutua’s outreach that more than 300 households to this day, have no at-home connection.
can mutual aid,
can community care,
exist without a space in common?
can community care,
exist without a space in common?
The conceptual gaps in understanding, what the internet is, how it works, how it reaches us, and how it could be different. Aquacomms includes Arts-based investigation that sustains us into the territories of not what is, but what could be. The project has two parts: Laying the Threads, mutual aid organizing for Internet equity, and Shared Imaginaries, arts-based actions, and speculation for Internet autonomy. At large the project includes translations, information sessions, resource distribution, intake, visualization, reading lists, training, coalition building, friendship forming, lots of long text exchanges, and most importantly, climbing up on roofs and installing the internet.
Laying the Threads
To get at-home internet in New York, there are a couple of commercial options, that are more or less available depending on your neighborhood. All of them, however, require proof of address, and a credit card, among other restrictive access barriers to get you connected. Across New York, NYC Mesh, an independent internet network has been circumventing these barriers since 2012. The community-ran network is donation-based and focuses on education to empower our relationship with the internet. It works as a mesh, so every connection expands the reach of the network to others. I learned about the mesh sometime in 2019 and organized our first Internet sessions at Mil Mundos Books - laying a bridge for what this project would evolve into.
Installs involve identifying if a connection is possible, granted by visibility to another NYC Mesh major hub or node. Then, we have to get to the highest possible point near that household, typically the roof. Once up there, we configure two antennas, the Omni and Litebeam, and lay the CAT-5 cables that connect all the way indoors and into a router. My favorite part of installing is crimping the cables. Handling the order of the colors is like putting threads together in preparation for embroidery. Weaving was the highest form of theory for Aymara peoples (Sociologia de la imagen, Silvia Cusicanqui), and it was a practice for women. In the early days, so was the internet. I see these histories as I throw the cables down the side of the building, and intricately set up the color order to ensure they work.
Internet trainings
Internet Info-session
Internet Book Pop-up
Shared Imaginaries
Throughout the program, arts-based learning supported us in creating and revealing shared languages and imaginaries to think and act on the internet as an essential community infrastructure. The internet augments our potential, with access to information and connectivity, but it is also a military tool, predictive policing, and exclusively biased algorithms. All of these realities are sustained through physical infrastructures, and yet in most conversations, the Internet is an abstract and intangible network. Rather than talking about an abstract future, an imaginary worldwide web that only caters to the global north, we made the internet tangible by drawing, painting, and sculpting it. By making it tangible, we can begin to transform it.
Painted indoors and outdoors from direct observation, Aquacomms concludes with a personal series of drawings and paintings of the internet and cables as the connective tissue of the network. This series reveals my learnings and curiosities towards the network at large. Simulating family portraits intersecting and becoming-with other species, animalistic cables with discrete personalities cohabitate in a landscape of change and ambiental disruption. The internet, grounded in the material world, is presented as a living, breathing entity, completely entangled with all forms of living. Where the internet lies, species are transformed, and where the community is organized, we can transform the internet.
Collective Sessions
Mapping the Internet
Aquacomms Painting Studies
- Maria H (Mil Mundos, BAM)
- Daniel H (NYC Mesh)
- Eliseo (BAM)
- Mohammad A.(NYC Mesh)
- Julien C (NYC Mesh)
- Marg S (NYC Mesh)
- Race after Technology - Ruha Benjamin,
- Networks of New York - Ingrid Burrington,
- Interpreting the Internet, Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America - Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Design Justice,
- Community-led practices to build the worlds we need - Sasha Constanza-Chock,
- Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile - Eden Medina.