CHT/Totalism.org: Kunsthal Hackbase
Vanaf oktober 2021 bewoont CHT/Totalism.org hackbase Kunsthal Gent, met een programma specifiek gefocust op participatie. Met labs, aanwezigheid op de site, excursies, happenings en een doorlopende presentatie in de studio van het Ontwikkelingsprogramma.
Het (dynamische) programma vind je HIER. Als je geïnteresseerd bent om deel te nemen, neem contact op met de hackbase via info@totalism.org
CHT/Totalism.org hackbase is an infrastructure research project in Canary Islands (Spain). Since 2011, ad-hoc crews use common-owned equipment and coordinate by consensus-established protocols, to curate, develop, document and practice the transitional tactics, technologies, theory, and arts, beyond capitalism. Started as a shared house; organizing experimental off-grid desert camps since 2014, open to all.
Crews are ad hoc groupings. They are process instead of loosely interpersonally coordinated. Against the trendy glorification of "communities", there is no in-group versus the out-group.
Crews establish nature—infrastructural situations, drawing equally from dramaturgic logic, DIY technology, psychedelic media, and ecological embeddedness.
Crews collaborate and publish on the homegrown hypermedia platform, “E2h”, rendering both hands-on and mediated research into a variety of online results (protocols, systematics, tactics, representations, software, etc.). This powers the project's replicability — durational (→successive crews), and expansive (→other bases).
The base is a primer of a new institutional type, prototyping and seeking to propagate its logic of networking and labouring. Bases principally don't see themselves as the destination, but as sustainable experimental apparatuses towards that effect. Bases however challenge all comfortable status-quo collectivities, and demonstrate increasing readiness for real-world transition.
CHT/Totalism.org established in 2011 as "CHT#1*", a house in Lanzarote (Canary Islands/Spain). The original hackbase*: a coliving hacklab. It hosted >150 people that stayed an average of 2 weeks. It collaboratively documented itself as a "Type 1" hackbase*, including the house manual*, a financial model*, an architectural manifesto*, etc — setting off a consistent and accelerating pace of authoring. The project also assembled an initial commons of equipment*, which was taken onto its next iteration as a "Type 2" base* in 2014: an off-grid operation. More organizationally and infrastructurally challenging, scalable, generally replicable, eco, cheaper ... Ultimately, more transformative and inclusive.
Throughout this time, CHT/Totalism.org has been roughly 50% on-site, 50% on-tour. Public presentations, hack and writing sessions were held in Brussels at IMAL, Medialab Prado & Transeuropa in Madrid, Berlin at Anthropocene Campus & Spektrum, Poortgebouw in Rotterdam, CCC congresses in Hamburg and Leipzig, XM24 Bologna, amongst countless hackerspaces and online channels.
The project acquired a large transporter* in 2016, and built it into a mobile living unit / media lab / cinema / bio-lab / studio capable platform — shapeshifting to a "Type 4" base*.
As of 2021:
CHT/Totalism.org is an expanse of thousands of interlinked pieces of living written, intermedia & sensor documentation, software specs & code*, and infrastructure equipment, held together as a multi-faceted hypermedia & resource compendium, and affiliated with a growing number of hack, art, activist and theory collectives.
The project's material instance has moved on to the Fuerteventura* island. We are on-site during the pandemic & continue to further the common infrastructure, develop new strategies for non-mainline subsistence and labour, and encourage the spread and consolidation of similar efforts.
