chapter

Avantwhatever.com

A domain for experimentation, collaboration, and creativity

Ben Byrne

The ubiquity of megacorporations online, the dominance of walled garden platforms and protocols, and the ever growing and resource hungry infrastructures on which these depend form the ‘internet complex’.¹ The platform capitalism of this complex restricts the possibilities for creative life on and offline.² Politics and their aesthetic expression are reduced to symbolic economies that themselves contribute to the escalating degradation of our intertwined mental, social, and environmental ecologies.³ There is urgent need for tactical maneuvers that contribute to the development of alternative creative ecologies such as those Avantwhatever.com embodies, treating online spaces as embedded in and dependent on the physical world, a commons for all.

Avantwhatever is a forum for digital sound, art and design. The organization started as an experimental music label, publishing releases freely online and physical editions in 100% post-consumer recycled packaging, which were launched with live performances. It has since hosted concert series, soundwalks and other place-based events, and three festivals. The last of the festivals, Avantwhatever 2020, was held entirely online during the COVID pandemic, with Avantwhatever.com designed as a domain for experimentation, collaboration, and creativity. The domain now further hosts the Avantwhatever Commissions series, which supports the creation of works that engage listeners with more-than-human realities.

Designed by me and Paul Mylecharane, who also developed the site, Avantwhatever.com uses the technologies and standardized protocols of the web to publish freely and openly, and is hosted using 100% renewable energy. This includes hosting interactive and procedural work as sub-domains, providing a forum for computational sonic creativity that is not supported by most commercial platforms. Seasons of commissions also include audiovisual works hosted using the software PeerTube, so that they can be shared across the decentralized networks of the fediverse, using software such as Mastodon.

The commissions are published freely online, with artists and others encouraged to stage further presentations of the works. This challenges dominant logics of artificial scarcity in which creative work is often sequestered in galleries and other spaces exclusively and only later released more widely, if at all. Instead, works are shared as widely as possible, building interest and engagement that fosters audiences and thus presentation opportunities for artists.

Capitalist extraction has relied upon ongoing enclosures of the public, of everything from land to the internet. Ecological urgencies now necessitate a return to holding in common, to claiming less in order to share in more. Avantwhatever.com helps cultivate a sonic domain, a commons that is free and open to all—listen in and contribute.