Michael Murtaugh is a technologist specialized in community databases, digital archives, and tools for new forms of reading and writing online. He is a member of Constant, where he is also part of the active archive research project,  investigating and developing digital archiving platforms for cultural institutions.

In this interview, Michael discusses how infrastructures shape practices, and how recognizing these performative aspects of infrastructure can be used to question relationships to and through infrastructure. He introduces Etherbox, a RaspberryPi operated network box enabling local communities to collectively write, but is set up as a visible tool to engage with imaginations of software, infrastructure, and services. The Etherbox thus takes the concept of active archives a step further. Whereas active archives try to formulate ideas how archives can live on and serve communities in more productive ways than a frozen account of a historical event, Etherbox expands the concern about the performativity of infrastructure into a tool, which addresses both the symbolical level (of speculative infrastructure) as well the functional level (of collective writing spaces). That intertwinedness of the aesthetical and the functional is expanding the territory of infrastructure into an ecosystem of writing.

Interview conducted by Shusha Niederberger, September 15, 2018, HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel).

 

It features different formats of working together (cyclic exhibition projects, reading groups, publishing, exploration of open source tools, research, workshop, education and all kind of inventive formats that go between and beyond).

Constant’s program is concerned with media, technology and artistic practice.

self-declaration:
„Constant is a non-profit, artist-run organisation based in Brussels since 1997 and active in the fields of art, media and technology.

Constant develops, investigates and experiments. Constant departs from feminisms, copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. Constant loves collective digital artistic practices. Constant organises transdisciplinary worksessions. Constant creates installations, publications and exchanges. Constant collaborates with artists, activists, programmers, academics, designers. Constant is active archives, poetic algorithms, body and software, books with an attitude, cqrrelations, counter cartographies, situated publishing, e-traces, extitutional networks, interstitial work, libre graphics, performative protocols, relearning, discursive infrastructures, hackable devices.“

Sources:

Laurence Rassel: Notes from Field-Workers, in: Art & Research, a Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Vol. 2, Nr. 2, Spring 2009

https://www.constantvzw.org/

Interviews

Experimenting with Institutional Formats. Interview with Laurence Rassel
Conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, 4 March 2018

Institutional Practice. Interview with Peter Westenberg
Conducted by Felix Stalder, 4 March 2018

Forms of Ongoingness. Interview with Femke Snelting and spideralex
Conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, 16 September 2018

Ecosystems of Writing. Interview with Michael Murtaugh
Conducted by Shusha Niederberger, 15 September 2018