🏛️🏗️ Resilient Cultural Infrastructure
Published on April 4, 2025 by Kelani Nichole
Culture is in a perilous position.
In the first quarter of 2025 we’ve witnessed a devastating loss of cultural legacy – from cancelled resources, to widespread censorship, and rampant data deletion. Suddenly, arts and culture institutions are coming into an awareness of the precarity of their data. Third-party technology providers pose a threat to mission driven work of artists, museums, universities, and cultural organizations.
Throughout history, artists have time and time again been catalysts for change by instigating massive shifts in culture. TRANSFER and our artists anticipated this moment of crisis, and have been preparing through critical inquiry in the gallery along with diligent research and development. Our exhibitions provided distant early warnings about the dangers of big tech, offering subversive glimpses at the nefarious extraction, bias and all-consuming agendas of Silicon Valley’s giants.
Equipped with a vision of the future ahead of this maelstrom, we have developed a proof-of-concept for resilient cultural infrastructure.
Based on principles of mutual support and care, TRANSFER and our artists built this vision together through generosity and collaboration for over a decade. Artists are taking back control of their data, giving them agency to preserve their cultural legacy without depending on traditional institutions or tech corporations.
This is not a platform. It's a model for cooperative data stewardship.
The best part: the infrastructure is open and available for anyone to use. By creatively weaving together open source softwares and decentralized storage protocols we have developed a unique trust-based stack that has two main components: an Archive Engine and a local-first Trust Client.
The core Archive Engine is flexible to adapt to the needs of any group that wishes to cooperatively archive data. Hardware storage nodes ensure individuals have full autonomy over their data, without any external dependencies. On top of this steadfast foundation, open protocols create a resilient network of trust that seeds encrypted backups of data across nodes, resulting in a resilient global peer-to-peer preservation network. Implementing the Archive Engine gives any distributed community a shared private file system that is redundantly stored and secure.
👀 Our repo will be public this spring, if you’d like early access to implement the Archive Engine please reach out 💌 [email protected].
The Trust Client enables cooperative data stewardship, and is designed to be lightweight so it can be easily reconstructed by conservators 100 years in the future. Artists own and tend to their data without reliance on any third party servers or platforms. The networked components of the Trust Client provide added benefits of redundant storage and efficient governance of a virtual co-op business, allowing artists to grow the value of their data. Filecoin smart contracts will facilitate co-op operations and cold-storage of the archives, offering another layer of redundancy to ensure the longevity of the legacy of the trust.
👀 We are currently iterating with artists and conservators on the Trust Client, to request a demo session please reach out 💌 [email protected].
A new kind of cooperative business entity ensures we can steward our data into the future. The member-owned data co-op is a sustainable model that allows us to maintain the decentralized infrastructure that enables long-term stewardship of our archives. We are thrilled to be collaborating with Jason Wiener|p.c. a boutique legal consulting practice that works with mission-driven companies, to formalize the bylaws that support our data stewardship and artist ownership principles.
AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting: The Power of Collaborations and Connections.
The American Institute for Conservation supports and empowers professionals, institutions, and the public in preserving our irreplaceable cultural heritage. TRANSFER is honored to share our learnings from these experiments in collaboratively built and maintained cultural legacy at the AIC’s upcoming convening in May 2025.
Kudos to Our Team
Founding Members: Kelani Nichole (NYC), Regina Harsanyi (NYC), Lorna Mills (Toronto), Carla Gannis (NYC), Rosa Menkman (Amsterdam), Eva Papamargariti (Athens), Huntrezz Janos (LA), Wade Wallerstein (SF)
Conservation Care Team: Sasha Arden (NYC), Claudia Röck (Basel), Taylor Healy (Chicago), Eddy Colloton (Denver), Nick Caplan (NYC)
Dev Team: Ryan Betts (Vancouver), Andrew Vivash (Vancouver), Lulu Tsui (NYC), Mattaniah Aytenfsu (NYC)
Thank you to Our Supporters
TRANSFER Data Trust is made possible by fiscal sponsorship from Gray Area. Thank you to all our sponsors for their generous support of our vision of a more equitable model for artist-owned decentralized cultural infrastructure.