Russian computer artist Danja Vasiliev’s work involves connecting everyday technologies with digital life, and his interests lie in free and open source software. He also likes to destroy things, especially information networks, which are bullying the world in his eyes. He’d like to destroy the internet, but Vasiliev doesn’t want to get rid of all the communication networks available, only the controlled and closely monitored space that the internet, as a worldwide network of computers that we know and use today, has become.

His 2009 work Netless petitions to get rid of government-owned media (including radio frequencies, controlled energy emissions and large companies’ ‘closed’ technologies) in favor of another, more open and free, internet. Instead, Vasiliev envisions a network that takes advantage of already established public transportation in cities as a system for information exchange.

The physical manifestation of Netless is just a small mobile device that stores and transfers data, and is able to connect wirelessly to a similar mobile device when the two are in proximity of one another. When a link is established, the devices exchange their data with one another. Vasiliev explains the project in greater detail on his website:

Netless is an anamorphic structure of nodes that are capable of holding digital data. Each node is a small, low-power wireless digital transponder. There is no permanent network connection. Every time a node would appear in the vicinity of any other node, they would establish a wireless link and swap the data that was stored internally… Nodes of the network are attached to city vehicles—trams, buses, taxis and possibly, pedestrians. Information exchange between the nodes happens only when the carriers pass by each other in city traffic. Digital data switches its routes in the same way you’d switch from tram #2 to bus #5.

The similarities between city transportation maps and the circuitry of modern networks are not accidental. Their purposes are identical—to provide efficient transport flow between all the locations within the area they cover… So why not use an already existing city transportation network for digital data transfers?

This desire to take the actions and principles of the internet and transpose them onto the physical world reminds us of the work of Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl, whose Dead Drops project similarly takes peer-to-peer anonymous file sharing out of the computer and onto city streets. To read about Netless or Vasiliev’s latest data manipulation work Newstweek, developed with Julian Oliver, visit his website here.