viki.wiki
viki.wiki was launched in 2022 to remedy some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world, particularly artists' lack of control over the use of their data and appropriation after DMCA. I publish federated wiki as needed by those artists, dealers, lawyers, collectives, museum people, critics and peers whose day-to-day activities in the global art trade are defined by garbage collection not social media.
There are 2,000+ individual content stores currently on the network, some active, some lost and forgotten; others dependent on metadata 100 years in the making-- long term data conservation is a complicated problem. What is the price of beer? How many connections are there in a neural network? When my server goes down, I receive DM's and notifications across twitter, insta and email, from people I've never met and don't keep tabs on, who are pissed off because they need access to resources they are hosting on my server, and who cannot pay me get their sites live, because I'm not a sys admin, and there are no terms and conditions, bug fixes or version releases, let alone redesigns or fundraising goals, that would lead these people to expect a process of linear, or even rational, development beyond the ongoing creation, linking & recombination of relatively autonomous pages.
The internet removes limits on spatiotemporal communications. Weirdly the structure of venture capitalist seed financing still thinks in terms of supply and demand, even though no product in human history has historically been able to compete with the popularity of fiction. The novel, a symbolically generalized format that produces credibility as it is consumed; works of contemporary art that do not seem to fall into the category of painting, sculpture, collage, new media, video or even installation; Douglass Mackey's meme's. What might eventually appear as "content" or "structure" or "user-generated" is merely an attempt at the system at self repair.
The re-entry of the difference between a model and a document into the language of the browser is isomorphic to what, in the 1960's, was a generalization of purpose in art. As the sole maintainer of exhibition documentation and resources spanning multiple institutional contexts, I rely on my prolongued exposure to the field, and not Stack Overflow, to implement a hosting environment for contemporary art on infinite tape.
Should you wish to funnel development dollars into tricking out this veritable data swiss army knife like a vending machine, go to hell. Or graduate from one of the seven of the nations most expensive colleges and receive a free subscription to square space with your MFA. Either way, by-sa.cc is to viki.wiki what information is to stuff: FORCED to remain open. We expect this new server will distill the federation down to its essence: a browser and a license.