A.PASS, Brussels, BE
2018-02-05
In the lexicon of networks, any computer connected to the Internet is called a host. This means that all computers have the ability to host content. But in the current paradigm of the Internet, some hosts are designated to be serving (servers), and other hosts are to be served (clients). For most activities on the Internet (email, web pages, social media applications and so on …) users act as clients to servers, delegating more and more of their content to the “cloud”. To understand the implications of this “delegation of hosting”, we will look together at different computers that act as servers, talk about where they are located, who maintains them, and why this all matters. Followed by a collective reading of texts by Muriel Combes and Invisible Committee.
Materially encounter a server in your own computer, compare to the one of apass, trace, whois, touch web files. How does a server become a computer and viceversa, where are we on the internet, where is the APASS server, what happens when a text file is thrown on a FTP server and/or an HTTP server.