nnn.freeport.global

nnn.freeport.global

Year: 
2018–ongoing
Edition: 
2018

The nnn.freeport.global platform is inspired by new networked geographies like duty-free art storage sites and free-trade zones, the darknet, and other liminal spaces, to ask what challenges and opportunities these spaces pose for anonymity, authorship, and autonomy. Built as an alternative space for the sharing and distribution of content, nnn.freeport.global uses the backstreets, black markets, and divergent parts of the internet to share and debate the value of art. The platform experiments with the peer-to-peer, content-addressed system Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) as backend, with the platform acting as a hybrid HTTP/IPFS gateway to the artworks and content. IPFS is one component in an emerging stack of web technologies—while still in its infancy, it promises to steer the development of digital communications in a distributed, peer-to-peer direction. It replaces central points of authority with protocol mechanisms, relies on blockchain-related techniques for control and governance, and moves storage and computation from data centers to the devices of the users. nnn.freeport.global launches during transmediale 2018 within the framework of the exhibition Territories of Complicity. The platform hosts underlying research as well as contextual and referential material connected to the artworks on display. It will develop into an online arts repository and shared online dissemination platform, bringing together four media art festivals and institutions that will add new content and artistic commissions to the nnn.freeport.global over the coming year. Instead of referring to objects by their location—what server they are stored on—IPFS refers to them by what they are, by creating a cryptographic fingerprint, or hash, of the content. This allows information to be addressed in a permanent manner, located in a peer-to-peer network.

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