Christina Battle: Stolon Mesh Network

Fellow

2020 - 2023

Illustration by Noelle Lee

Stolon Mesh is a community mesh network seeded by 221A that offers free wifi to users in Vancouver’s DTES & Chinatown, and beyond. Developed by artist and 221A Fellow Christina Battle in collaboration with a team of researchers, community liaisons and technologists, Stolon Mesh is a growing network infrastructure with the aim of creating a local-first digital commons that will remain just, caring and responsible to others. The network’s first node is located within the x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ New Growth《新生林》garden at 271 Union Street.

Contributors

Christina Battle, Fellow
Rithikha Rajamohan, Project Consultant
Noelle Lee, Community Lead and Embedded Artist
Sergio Rondero, Community Liaison
Herb Varley, Community Liaison
Jacob Sayles, Technical Advisor
Boris Mann, Technical Advisor
Greg McMullen, Legal Counsel
Tao Fei, Producer
Stephan Wright, Staff
Jesse McKee, Staff

Inspired by the plant systems of the x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ New Growth《新生林》garden, Stolon Mesh is a prototype for a wireless mesh network originating in Vancouver’s DTES & Chinatown. Developed by artist Christina Battle in collaboration with a team of researchers, community liaisons and technologists, Stolon Mesh is a growing network infrastructure with the aim of creating a local-first digital commons that will remain just, caring and responsible to others.

As a prototype, Stolon Mesh consists of an initial node at the x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ New Growth《新生林》garden at 271 Union Street, with a second community node to be activated shortly at coFood Collaborative Garden at 265 East 4th Ave. A Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Manifesto have been established to help guide and shape responsible and careful use of the network. As well, an online resource, Reflections on Stolon Mesh (a How-to Guide), has been produced which documents the ideas, observations and lessons learned across the project’s development, and offers practical strategies to other communities looking to build similar mesh infrastructures.

Visit the living site https://www.stolonmesh.ca/ for complete project details.

“With this first phase complete, my hope is that the mesh can begin to flourish and take shape as the community feels is right, and that, once folks become aware of its potential and its utility, we have put an infrastructure in place for the network to continue to develop and thrive from. Another hope is that, in a potential future crisis, community might remain connected through the Stolon Mesh and their ability to organize and collaborate might be supported and made easier through the mesh network.” – Christina Battle

Special thanks to partners Coworking BC, Cascadia Collaborative Design and DWeb YVR. Stolon Mesh has also benefited from conversations with peers from Toronto Mesh, Seattle Community Network, Newport Wireless Mesh, Coolab Brazil, Philly Community Wireless, Personal Telco Project, Bring The Web, Mass Mesh, COW Mesh, and The Association for Progressive Communications.

Connect to Stolon Mesh

The network’s first node is located within the x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ New Growth《新生林》garden at 271 Union Street. Visit the garden and log on:

Wifi: stolonmesh
Password: newgrowth

While this network uses standard protected access, users should remain vigilant about their own security when using this and any network. For more information, and to read the network’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, please visit https://www.stolonmesh.ca/

Stay tuned for announcements about a second community node at coFood Collaborative Garden (265 East 4th Ave).

Get in Touch

Are you a community garden or community hub interested in hosting your own Stolon Mesh node? Do you live or work in the vicinity of the existing nodes and are interested in meshing (accessing and participating in the network)?

Contact help@stolonmesh.ca

Publication: Imagining new systems of exchange

February 2022

Archived Activities

Día de los Muertos

November 2, 2023

Live Stream — Infrastructure & the Back Loop: Christina Battle with Stephanie Wakefield

April 30, 2021

Live Stream - Introducing 221A's 2021 Fellows

January 22, 2021

Contributors

Christina Battle (Edmonton, amiskwacîwâskahikan ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᕀ ᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ, Canada) is an artist, curator and educator working within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Battle’s work focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster and the ways in which it might be utilized as a framework for social change. Much of this work extends from her recent PhD dissertation (2020) which looked closer to community responses to disaster: the ways in which they take shape, and especially to how online models might help to frame and strengthen such response.
Rithikha Rajamohan is the Founder and Director of the V6A Collaborative, a network organization working to develop and deploy civic infrastructure needed for the 21st century. V6A was born from the recognition that cognizant and scalable civic experimentation is a powerful tool to help societies adapt and thrive in times of change. Managing a portfolio of coalition-based rewilding, community technology and open democracy projects, Rithikha supports V6A’s mission to leverage the existing wealth of social, ecological and technological knowledge in communities and employ them to support the transition to more sustainable, cooperative ways of living. The shared, unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, BC, is one of many places Rithikha calls home.
Noelle Lee (Yinnuo/Yannok/Ayan/李茵諾) is an interdisciplinary artist based in the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) unceded territories, otherwise known as Vancouver. They are Peranakan (Hokkien-Sulawesi), Chinese-Canadian, and Hong Kong-Chinese. Stemming from an interest in migration, his practice looks at new imaginaries that go beyond binaries, drawing from hybrid realities and contradictory histories. They are especially interested in tracing the spatial and temporal cross-pollination that occurs throughout language, food, garment, and belief. Her work thinks through networks of local and global infrastructure, functioning through a place of trial and error, with continuous questioning of the new imaginary that is being posited. Their material practice is land-based, ranging from gardening for natural textiles, dyes, and foods, to an investigation in conceptual and digital technologies.
Sergio Rondero is an outreach worker at Watari, a non-profit charitable organization in the Downtown Eastside that runs support services and community programs touching upon a range of issues such as food security and migrant worker support. He has a passion for flaneur photography and discovering new music. He also has a background in community radio, having volunteered for seven years at various stations across Canada and Mexico.
Herb Varley is a Nisga’a and Nuu-chah-nulth activist, and longtime resident of the Downtown Eastside.
Jacob Sayles is a creative and entrepreneurial technologist with over 20 years of experience and a history of innovative ideas, well executed projects, and management of diverse teams. In 2007, he recognized the growing trend of independent and remote workers and opened Office Nomads, the first coworking space in Seattle, WA. To support this business and others like it, he wrote Nadine, the first open source coworking platform, and founded Open Coworking, a non-profit dedicated to the Coworking Movement. In 2016 Jacob relocated to Vancouver, Canada to take on the role of Director of Technology for 312 Main, a 105,000 sf coworking community in the old Downtown Vancouver Police building.

Jacob is currently the Technical Director at Kanawha Design, a family run coworking design studio that supports small, medium, and large collaborative spaces with business planning, operations, community development, IT infrastructure, and the many uses of technology to support their memberships and communities.
Boris Mann is a long time technologist, entrepreneur, & community builder both on and offline in Vancouver and beyond. Boris is the founder of Fission, a startup working on developer tools supporting user-owned data and decentralized computing. Locally, he's helping to grow the DWeb Vancouver community, and is a board member of the CoSocial Community Cooperative, building Canadian owned social media. He likes to cook & eat.

https://bmannconsulting.com/
Greg McMullen is a lawyer, consultant, and internet activist based in Vancouver. His work focuses on emerging technologies and their societal impacts, particularly in the areas of privacy, digital rights, and national security. He has worked as plaintiff counsel on a number of high profile class actions, including Douez v Facebook, and was Chief Policy Officer for the startup, BigChain DB, based in Berlin. Greg has a JD from the University of British Columbia, an MA from the University of Calgary, and a BA from the University of New Brunswick. He was admitted to the BC Bar in 2010.
Tao Fei is a multidisciplinary cultural worker with over 15 years of experience as a producer, non-profit director, researcher and writer. Tao is currently Producer, Strategic Initiatives at 221A where she advances the research and development goals of the organization, with a focus on decentralized technologies and polycentric governance and ownership models in art and public sector contexts. Prior to joining 221A she was Executive Producer of the POP Montreal International Music Festival, where she led the expansion of visual art, film, symposium and community engagement verticals alongside the festival's core music programming. Recent cohorts and fellowships include the Banff Centre for the Arts, Saas-Fee Institute of Art, The New Centre for Research & Practice, and KERNEL. She is a founding Board member of Cinéma Public in Montreal. Born in Hong Kong, Tao is sixth-generation Chinese-Canadian with maternal family ties to Vancouver’s Chinatown. She moved back to Vancouver in 2019, after 20+ years away. tfei@221a.ca
Stephan Wright is the Head of Facilities & Production at 221A. Wright graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University and has previously worked for over 10 years in technical roles in both the construction and non-profit arts sectors. Wright is the primary technical expert at 221A and is responsible for management of the organization’s technical needs, including the on-site safety of 221A’s buildings. Wright works with third party contractors, including engineers and architects, builders and fabricators. swright@221a.ca
Jesse McKee (b.1984) is a leader in the Culture Industries, a Curator of Contemporary Art and Design, and he is the Head of Strategy at 221A. 221A works with artists and designers to research and develop social, cultural and ecological infrastructure. There, he leads the Organization’s advancement, communications, research, and programming. The organization develops and operates 14 000 m² of cultural-use commercial and residential real-estate across a portfolio of properties that are sub-tenanted according to a cost-recovery operating model. 221A’s artistic program hosts long-term Fellowships for artists and designers, as well as producing public realm art and design projects, and develops education and learning programs, which work with communities to improve the public amenities and reduce barriers at the organization's cultural infrastructures and beyond. From 2019-24, McKee is the lead investigator on 221A’s Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks Digital Strategy, which is developing a digitally cooperative culture by “recommoning” land, data and objects. From 2020-22, he is a member of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association’s Policy Advisory Council, and he is challenged by rebooting cities and public culture venues in equitable, novel and progressive ways in the wake of the COVID-19 long-tail global pandemic. Previously, he was the Curator of The Banff Centre (2011-15), and has worked with leading cultural organizations such as Western Front, Vancouver; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The Independent Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; The Barbican Centre, London; Things that can happen, Hong Kong and Tranzit.org, Romania. In 2017, he was the curator of Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, the inaugural edition of a civic triennial exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. McKee has served as a juror for the Sobey Art Award, and was a member of the Canada Council for the Art's Asia Pacific Delegation. He has written essays and reviews for Canadian Art, C Magazine, Fillip, Border Crossings, Kaleidoscope, and Cura. A recent catalogue essay, Surreal Ghosts and Neuroplastic Ancestors correlates Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson’s filmmaking with the neuroplastic effects of Vancouver’s economic enclosure over the past decade; published by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia and Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. A recent monograph on the work of the artist Neïl Beloufa, People, Love, War, Data & Travels, includes an essay by McKee, Counting on People: How it Started… How it’s Going, and this text frames the productions of Beloufa’s films from the mid-2010s as they foretold a global pandemic all enacted through video calls, amid the consequences of social media’s unchecked narrative accelerants; edited by Myriam Ben Salah with Benjamin Thorel, and published by After 8 Books, Paris. jmckee@221a.ca

Acknowledgements

Unceded Territory

221A acknowledges that the area called Vancouver is within the unceded Indigenous territories belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. 221A recognizes that the colony of British Columbia was created through organized dispossession and colonial violence. 221A seeks to shift its organizational practices to work together with Indigenous people to end ongoing violence, dispossession and displacement.