REC live
Click here to see latest updates and photos from the project!
For the first year and half of the Regenerative Energy Communities project we resisted posting photos onto the dominant platform capitalist photo sharing sites of the present. These platforms, unsurprisingly, share in similarly damaging approaches as those of dominant actors in energy and agriculture (e.g., unsustainable practices of extraction and energy use), and we decided to try to hold to more regenerative propositions in our approaches to uses of technology in our work.
This lead us to discussing what horizons and forms regenerative media practices might take. For our Energy Giveaway at the Humuspunk Library exhibition, we reached out to Cristina Cochier of the varia collective to see if they could build a low energy regenerative media interface for posting photos to and we can now share the results, which are available to follow here: REC live! (“XMPP x REC”)
Below is the description of the interface from the exhibition launch, and we hope to be able to develop it over the coming months of the project.
Thank you to Cristina and varia and definitely check out their other work for more on technological alternatives for collective sociality: Cristina Cochier website // varia website
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XMPP x REC, Cristina Cochior (2023)
XMPP x REC, is a regenerative collective digital infrastructure for the Regenerative Energy Communities project. It emerges from ongoing projects by the Varia group, whose members work to develop collective approaches to everyday technology.
XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol and has its roots in the Jabber community. The protocol emerged in 1999 as a decentralised, secure and open alternative to commercially-driven instant messaging services. XMPP x REC was produced in response to a request from Regenerative Energy Communities for a non-extractive social interface for sharing updates and ongoing conversations from the project, and represents one example of the sociality afforded by the XMPP protocol.
Materials: interdependent server, pi, xmpp, bots.
