SaaS (Software as a Service) is a business model under which a company develops a software product and makes it available to customers online. The software is hosted “in the cloud”, and whoever uses it accesses it remotely through a subscription (monthly, annual, etc.). The cloud is built on deeply extractive, exploitative and exclusive log(ist)ics. In political-aesthetic terms, it is a regime that prescribes what is feasible and thinkable, flattens and standardizes the most everyday experience, constrains the material conditions of possibility in the sharing of experience with technology, and imposes conditions of subjectivity and logistically mediated coexistence.

In response to the cultural regime of The Cloud as a contemporary socio-technical monoculture, the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) has been carrying out research and action to articulate, challenge and reimagine computing infrastructures. In the framework of InfraMaintenance [1], Hangar’s research line, as an associate member of TITiPI Jara proposes a project entitled Life as a Service to put her para-academic action-research methodologies in contact with Hangar through a dual action. First, she will address the local genealogies of resistance, invention and computational autonomy or federation in Barcelona and Hangar, from the emergence of cyberfeminism and cyberpunk to the devastating arrival of the SaaS paradigm and its ways of making the world. In the case of Barcelona, this means addressing the coexistence of constructs that are as apparently distant as smart cities and platform cooperativism. Second, extrapolating the idea of software as a service to another scale, she will observe situations in which this logic can be useful for analysing the neoliberal-computational relationship with life (understood as an experience, a condition and a category by the bios-zoe anthropocentric and androcentric continuum). Hence the title, Life as a Service [2]. Despite the necropolitical mandate of The Cloud and against the relational service economy, what practices and positions could make room for disobedience to this regime, performing regenerative care towards its radical (from roots) transformation, or even palliative care towards its possible abolition?

With a sensitivity magnetized between trans*feminist technosciences, anti-fascist study and intervention of infrastructures, regenerative justice, and the anti-techno-colonial struggle, the work of this first fellowship of InfraMaintenance aims to detect, name, problematize or perhaps put an end to the tension between cultural representations and practices in the face of collapse and solutionism based on agile computing and optimization.

Hangar and La Virreina are collaborating in the accompaniment of LaaS (Life as a Service) by Jara Rocha within the framework of the First Hangar Fellowship, putting into practice a joint research and publishing mechanism to organize public sessions somewhere between open conversation, publication based on multiple writings, and the prospecting of instalments of institutional autofiction.

In Hangar, Jara Rocha’s project is set in the framework of InfraMaintenance, a research-action line based on the hypothesis that infrastructures of all kinds (including administrative, legal, technological and institutional ones) govern more than ideological statements. In fact, if the infrastructures govern, it is because they materialize or give body to the ideological. From this perspective, maintenance operations on infrastructures can perhaps be considered a more effective mode of political intervention than discursive interpellation. The intention of InfraMaintenance is therefore to do DIY on infrastructures. Rocha’s project reviews the history of the maintenance of technological infrastructures in Hangar but also intervenes in them. Hangar’s technological-institutional body serves as a case study and a proving ground in which to test her research materially and semiotically. She does this by placing at the centre the paradigm or culture of “service” in a way that allows us to glimpse the obstacles to the desire not to succumb to user subjectivity.

Since 2016, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge has defined research as the backbone of all its work formats (exhibitions, public programmes, publications, mediating proposals, etc.) without distinction and, above all, as an institutional methodology and ideology. During the period 2016-2019, a system of polyphonic research was established. It was broken down into “social imaginary production platforms”, which operated with activist collectives whose situated practices invited us to think about a possible geography of Barcelona’s dissidence. LaaS (Life as a Service) falls within the priority that La Virreina grants to research processes and, more specifically, right now, to the urgency of critically influencing the bureaucratization and managementization that is being accepted as a mandatory mechanism by public institutions. La Virreina does not have its own institutional regulations or private space. Its management does not have executive powers, and crucial parts of its contents are outsourced. In maintaining such a place, we must explore how much sovereignty we have and how much we must build, how to broaden and share it, and how to dissent from the interferences of administrative apparatuses that reformat the institutional microdynamics.

ACTIVITIES

• 02.03.2023 - Hangar – Piquetes en la nube (Pickets in the Cloud), with Karl Moubarak and Cristina Cochior). https://hangar.org/en/agenda-hangar/8m-piquetes-en-la-nube-sesion-inaugural-del-primer-fellowship-hangar-para-la-investigacion-laas-life-as-a-service-de-jara-rocha/
• 24.04.2023 -Hangar – Naturoculturas son disturbios #11 (Naturocultures are riots #11), a radio programme broadcast on Dublab with two anti-capacitist and anti-techno-solutionist collectives fighting for computer accessibility: MELT (Berlin) and Irreparables (Barcelona). (Guests: Ren Loren Britton and Iz Paehr).
• 05.09.2023 - La Virreina – Desconfiad de la piedad química (Be Wary of Chemical Mercy). A talk by Marta Echaves.
• 13.05.2023 - Hangar – A round table with Laurence Rassel and Nicolas Malevé, accompanied by Jara Rocha, Efraín Foglia and Anna Manubens.
• 06.02.2023 - La Virreina – The Reticular Society. A talk by Ian Alan Paul.
• July 2023 - Hangar – Operations Room with TITiPI (Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard, Miriyam Aouragh and Seda Gürses).
• October 2023 - La Virreina – A dialogue between Anna Manubens and Jara Rocha based on materials generated in Operations Room.
• December 2023 - Hangar and La Virreina – A performance and seminar by Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

[1] Inframaintenance, Hangar’s research-action line.

[2] Laas (Life as a Service), a proposal by Jara Rocha, associate member of TITiPI, the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest.