I initially chose to invest time and work into the XML to process some thoughts I had on maintenance throught hands-on practice.
These thoughs, and my interest in the topic of maintenance, come from different past experiences that I puzzled together only recently. In the following entry I will write a few words about each of them.
I grew up around a lot of abandoned spaces. From entire buildings and old villas to industrial complexes and ice rinks. During my high school years I spent a lot of time exploring these places, which usually happened in the summer together with some friends from class, but as I grew older I progressively became more disturbed by their presence.
When asking other locals about the reasons why these spaces where abandoned, some of the most stupid stories I've ever heard came up.
One example is from a paper factory that was bought by an american than never payed taxes on the property for a long time, so the police confiscated it. Another one is a building in my town that was constructed declaring 5 floors to the municipality, but then because the workers built an attic, the whole project stopped at the final stages, the 5-and-a-banana stories building is empty to this day.
So yeah if it isn't clear, spaces of abandonment piss me off, mostly for the waste of material resources and the waste of potential uses for the space itself.
Talking about waste of resources, since 2023 I started practicing maintenance and repair of different electronic devices (mostly laptops and smartphones). Putting the work needed to keep a device running for longer than it is designed to, made me think a lot about the way we are taught to replace everything at the littlest inconvenience.
Before starting xpub I worked as a barman in a touristic restaurant. In that full full time job, maintenance meant keeping the space of the bar tidy and doing storage and inventory work on a daily basis.
It was strictly functional, but I came to appreciate the work I put in to keep things in a good state. I also remember that I used to re-arranged everything every once in a while, to organize the space and keep it in a way that felt like it was more mine that the restaurant's, and in the end, this was the case, because I was the one that was spending the most time there.
When I joined xpub I was very intrigued by the fact we had both physical and digital shared infrastructure. The space of the server is the one I enjoyed hanging out in the most on the digital side, we started connecting to it during prototyping classes of the first year and then I later started spending time in it to do prototypes and practice scripting.
One of the projects that may or may not be made I remember thinking of from the first year was a bundled set of tools for server maintenance for artists, that would contain interactive tools and understandable documentation that would highight and talk about basic practices to make sure the server would work fine and allow you to do basic operations, like backing up files, reference frequently used commands, and do some spring cleaning of unused or heavy files.
None of this came to be in the end because the interest of the class overall did not converge on the server. It remained a functional space for others to store individual or group files and to host the websites of the special issues we made. The way I dreamt it was more of a social space, some place where we could learn together, make tools for eachother, test eachothers work out, and also do some pranks :p.
Even though it never happened, server maintenance is a topic I frequently think about, mostly because during the course I started looking for alternatives to well known big tech services, that treat digital infrastructure simply as a commodity to make profit out of.
I was interested in the XML for the many secrets that were hidden inside of it, but also because it was a potential experiment for me to process all of these thoughts I gathered troughout the years. In a way, I saw bits of all of these things inside of it, this is the reason why I was drawn to it.