The Digital Prepper Toolkit (Sarah Grant, Rosa Menkman)

Bio

Sarah Grant is an American media artist and educator based in Berlin. She is the Visiting Professor of New Media at Kunsthochschule Kassel with a focus on radio art and computer networking. In her practice she researches and develops open source software, artworks as educational tools, and workshops that demystify computer networking and radio technology. She also organizes the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for social justice activations, critical investigations, and creative experiments in telecommunications.

Rosa Menkman's work focuses on noise artifacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media (such as glitch and encoding and feedback artifacts). The resulting artifacts of these accidents can facilitate an important insight into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardization via resolutions.

Through her research, which is both practice based and theoretical, she uncovers these anti-utopic, lost and unseen or simply "too good to be implemented" resolutions — to produce new ways to use and perceive through and with our technologies.

Rapid Response Project 

The artists Grant and Menkman’s Digital Prepper Toolkit is a project in support of self-reliance in the event of a digital crisis — or when no infrastructure or social platforms can be trusted by the public. The Toolkit can serve as an alternative to existing digital platforms and would come with extensive documentation, suggested deployments and how-tos, and could be tailored for different types of digital crises taking place in varying spaces.