unCloud (installation, software art + video, 2012)  An application that enables anyone with a laptop to create an open wireless network and distribute their own information in a local context. Once it is launched, a passerby using a mobile internet device can connect to this open wireless network. Users can access information wirelessly while at the same time remain disconnected from the internet since the wireless network is only local. The person running the application can decide what information is shown in any web address. A passerby that connects to the open wireless and visits www.google.com gets instead the information that the person running unCloud previously selected. unCloud does not depend on a remote datacenter, instead it can be run from a laptop, making it an ideal application to run in a train.

The proliferation of social networking and current developments in service—based platforms (what has become known as ‘cloud computing’) provide explicit examples of the privatization and commodification of social production. What becomes clear is that our experience of the web is bound to inherent paradoxes that are reflected in its technical organization. One of the foundations for its critique relies on the recognition of the ways in which the energies of peer production and social exchange have been expropriated from the commons by the market.