DWeb for Creators

Knowledge Session: Introduction to Decentralized Web (Dweb) and Its Cultural Foundations with Sarah Grant and Regina Harsanyi

Since Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 as a “universal linked information system” the web has grown to become the world’s dominant interface with the Internet. This session will explore the history of the World Wide Web while analyzing the technologies, organizations, legislations, and ideologies that shaped the web over the past three and a half decades. It will lend a particular focus on the colonial legacies that are embedded in the web and its underlying network technologies.

Praxis Session: Command Line for Creatives with Sarah Friend and Sarah Grant

To get up and running with various DWeb tools often involves using the command line interface, or cli, but they rarely actually teach cli itself. This session will focus on cli exclusively, looking at foundational skills that will make all other explorations of software development and DWeb more approachable.

Knowledge Session: DWeb Lexicon and Ecosystem with Regina Harsanyi, ngọc triệu, and Sarah Grant

The session serves as a valuable resource for anyone seeking the knowledge necessary to confidently engage in conversations about decentralization. We will delve into the lexicon of the decentralized web and unlearn prevailing misconceptions regarding what it means. By mapping out its intricate ecosystem, we will explore fundamental concepts integral to the DWeb—such as decentralized, distributed, and federated principles. We will consider DWeb’s ecosystem and key events and players in its evolution from multiple perspectives laying the groundwork necessary for meaningful engagement, and informed decision-making.

Praxis Session: Data Sovereignty and Storage with Kelani Nichole

Hegemonies have benefited from extracting our personal data: reducing our most precious resource –our relationships – into the basis of surveillance capitalism. This session starts with a brief history of the infrastructure of the world wide web, specifically with the lens of a user’s relationship to their own data. In the workshop following, we’ll cooperatively map the data we are generating and examine how that data can be leveraged as intellectual property. Re-imagining ways to take back ownership of our data we will collaboratively engage in exercises of preserving value, longevity, privacy, and rights regarding where our data is stored and how it is monetized.

Knowledge Session: The Evolution of DWeb Art, Activism, and History with Regina Harsanyi and Sarah Grant

Despite popular belief, the history of artists working in DWeb does not begin in 2018 or even 2009. In this session, we will examine decentralization in the context of the arts from the 1970s to the present moment. Participants will learn why artists have been drawn to making work with and about decentralized networks and who helped to shape the evolving aesthetics and discourse around artwork related to these systems. Finally, participants will learn how artists have used decentralized tooling for autonomy and why it may or may not have been successful.

Praxis Session: Critical DWeb Art Projects + Practices with Sarah Friend and Ayana Zaire Cotton

Critics have cited a lack of distrust in institutions as the impetus for the rise in decentralized web technologies. How might centering collective ownership and collective imagination allow us to seed ways of working and being on a decentralized web so that we reinforce care instead of conspiracy? This session will look in-depth at approaches to integrating DWeb tools into art practice from curation, to publishing, to studio practice and community building. We will kick the session off by engaging with case studies of art practices and projects that leverage decentralization as a method of community building followed by an open discussion to critique, synthesize, and imagine alongside these case studies. Next up, we will explore artist DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), as ways to hold assets in common, and discuss experimental voting and coordinating tools.

Knowledge Session: Values and Philosophical Underpinnings of DWeb with mai ishikawa sutton

This session will engage in a critical analysis of the DWeb Principles as a case study, examining one approach taken by a community to crystallize a shared vision for distributed network infrastructure. Since 2016, the Internet Archive has convened a global community to share ideas and approaches to building a decentralized web. Members of this DWeb community decided to collaborate and develop a set of principles to define their shared values. What resulted was a document that has guided the community since 2021. We will compare the document to other principles and statements around “internet freedom,” “digital rights”, and “decolonized technology,” and explore the purpose that such declarations serve for their communities. We will analyze technologies and organizations from both the World Wide Web and the Decentralized Web through the lens of the DWeb Principles and students’ personal values.

Praxis Session: Cloudbusting! Self-Hosting Your Own Web Services with Sarah Grant

In this workshop, we will learn how to configure a Raspberry Pi with YunoHost, a community-supported platform that provides access to dozens of different self-hosted applications. These applications include email, cloud storage, chat services, artificial intelligence tools, and many more — all of which can be installed directly on your Raspberry Pi.

Knowledge Session: Governance, Creative Ownership and Cross-institutional Collaboration with Kelani Nichole and mai ishikawa sutton

Cooperative forms of resilience are emerging, powered by decentralized principles of transparency, solidarity, and adaptability. In this session, we will share case studies from across the cultural sector shining on artists, organizations, and institutions exploring decentralized principles and cooperative structures. We’ll discuss governance models and the patterns of human coordination that underlie cooperative efforts. Participants will be invited to contribute their experiences with solidarity economies surrounding their practice, which powers much of the emerging cultural sector. Together we’ll create a generative model for building new forms of cooperation and resilience as a blueprint to deploy in your own work.

Praxis Session: Introducing Decentralized Social Media with Kelani Nichole and Sarah Friend

This session on Decentralized Social Media provides an overview of platforms and protocols such as Bluesky (ATProto) and Mastodon (ActivityPub). Participants will set up accounts on both platforms, as well as participate in hands-on activities building on experience from the command-line and server set up praxis sessions. The instructors will also lead participants through a discursive skill sharing session on using these technologies, as well as more well-known tools and platforms, for promotion of creative work.

Knowledge Session: Diversification of Storage Practices with Regina Harsanyi & Kelani Nichole

Stanford University articulated one of the most important tenets of digital preservation, LOCKSS or “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe,” but keeping many copies of a file in the same location can have dire consequences. Diversifying where our cultural heritage, personal and otherwise, is kept is just as important as making copies of it all. We will cover tools in hardware and software that exist to help keep our files safe. We will also explore ways to network them together for the purpose of community archiving. We’ll learn about the pros and cons of running your own server, maintaining your own preservation hardware, offline storage, online storage, and security.

Praxis Session: Archiving Preservation in DWeb with Regina Harsanyi

Decentralized tooling may appear to be a useful evolution in archiving, preservation, and conservation of born-digital and digitized material but what you put into a decentralized system is what you get out of it. This course will teach you how to prepare files for decentralized archiving, including file organization, naming, telling the difference between archival and non-archival files, and encryption methods. Learn what metadata to include and how to write a checksum that verifies your files haven’t changed. You will then learn to tell the difference between good decentralized resources for storing files versus not so useful choices. We’ll also discuss why decentralized practices in archiving at large have not been adopted.

Knowledge Session: Decentralization: Sovereignty, Power, and Critical Practice in DWeb with Ayana Zaire Cotton & ngọc triệu

Our individual cultural background and knowledge influence how we define decentralization and perceive its impact on our society. In this session, we will examine various facets of DWeb through the critical lens of decoloniality. We’ll also explore how DWeb technologies — as a mode of being, thinking, and creating — enable us to co-design more just and better digital futures. Participants will acquire insights into the neo-colonialist implication within the realm of technology in general and in DWeb in particular. The discussion will include whether technological decentralization leads to power decentralization, examining sovereignty and decolonization in relation to DWeb.

Praxis Session: DIY Long Range (LoRa) Meshed Networks with Meshtastic with Sarah Grant

In this hands-on workshop, we will learn how to build and configure our own long-range mesh networks using ESP32 devices equipped with LoRa, Bluetooth, and WiFi capabilities running Meshtastic. Meshtastic provides a user-friendly platform for connecting to and configuring ESP32 boards through a mobile app, enabling us to easily set up resilient networks independent of traditional infrastructure. We’ll also explore how to create secure chat rooms and communication channels with customizable privacy levels.

Knowledge Session: DWeb’s Social and Community Impact with Sarah Grant

In this session, we will begin by analyzing DWeb’s impact from community, non-technical, and social perspectives. We will discuss mesh networks, examining their emergent potential. We will engage with world-building, speculative design, and futurism through exercises that visualize future scenarios enabled by DWeb.

Praxis Session: DWeb Worldbuilding + Speculative Design with Ayana Zaire Cotton

Synthesizing the concepts learned over this series of DWeb sessions Ayana invites you to leverage the power of Worldbuilding. Now that we know the critiques and the possibilities of DWeb, what world do we want to build in response? Come along to Cykofa, a speculative world of decolonial aesthetics, a parallel universe suspended among past and future. Visit Cykofa and learn to imagine, speculate, and design your own parallel universe, one where decentralization is an ancient reality. Explore expansive modes of decentralization that might have nothing to do with hardware or computer interfaces as we know them.

Students will have an opportunity to share a 5-minute virtual presentation with the public through an online salon on their work or research from the course. Reflecting the diverse interests of students and instructors in the course, the presentation may cover artworks, community initiatives, cultural interventions, archives, research projects, or technological prototypes engaged with the decentralized web.