Sarah Grant, Juan Pablo García Sossa
| Futura Trōpica | is an intertropical decentralized network of grass-root local networks for lateral exchange of local resources and other forms of Knowledges, Designs and Technologies. It plays with the narrative of the Wood Wide Web and the way trees are interconnected, communicate to each other and redistribute nutrients with the help of fungi as mycellium. It uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol to connect Rhizomes in Bogotá, Kinshasa and Bengaluru. Each Rhizome is composed of a raspberry pi-based wireless access point and web server in combination with a USB based distribution system similar to ‘El Paquete Semanal’ in Cuba.
Sarah Grant is an American artist and professor of new media based in Berlin at the Weise7 studio. Her teaching and art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Artfrom UC Davis and a Masters in Media Arts from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Since 2015, she has organized the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications.
Juan Pablo García Sossa — jpgs / Futura Trōpica Netroots (*Bogotá, COL) is a Designer, Researcher and Artist fascinated by the clash between emerging technologies and grass-root popular culture in tropical territories. His practice explores the development of cultures, visions, realities and worlds through the remix and reappropriation of technologies from a Tropikós perspective (Tropics as Region and Mindset). JPGS has been part of diverse research institutions and design studios and currently is a design research member at SAVVY Contemporary The Laboratory of Form-Ideas’ Design Department in Berlin and Co-Director of Estación Terrena, a space for Arts, Research and Technologies in Bogotá.