Cascade Network: Sovereign Cultural Communication

The coming decades bring displacement at an unprecedented level in the Pacific region as huge numbers of people face evacuation from their homelands. Ongoing cultural transmission is a vital concern for displaced groups: it strengthens resilience and identity. 

Accessible networks are needed that enable vital culture to be shared across distance and establishes communities themselves as owners of cultural knowledge.

The Cascade Network connects community creativity and long-established cultural organisations with emerging immersive network technologies. 

The Cascade Network supports communities to design their own networks through creative workshops with an emphasis on the sovereignty of diverse Pacific cultures. Its purpose is to support community leadership in protecting vital intangible culture and alternative value exchange and facilitate solidarity between indigenous communities.

The first prototype is developed with NGOFurtherArts who have been invited to record ancient practices of shell money, pandanus mats and star lore with island communities in Vanuatu.

Our mission is to put emerging communication technologies in service to the communication and cultural needs faced by communities relocating or in transition. 

During the evacuation of Ambae, the Ambae community asked Further Arts to support them in recording the stories of the island as community members permanently relocate to nearby islands. This invitation galvanised the Cascade Network to explore mobilising the creative and radical potentials of emerging digital technologies towards holding cultural knowledge and ensuring cultural sovereignty for communities.

As the people relocate to neighbouring islands there are serious questions around resources, work and how to continue creating value to sustain the displaced. The Cascade Network strengthens the work of Further Arts in supporting the people of Ambae record their own stories and culture as they are forced to leave their homelands. The Cascade Network looks to support their documentation mission with cutting edge immersive techniques and the development of a digital network to hold the immersive recordings in collaboration with Vanuatu Cultural Centre. The network works together with the intention that - with trust, care and mutual respect - progressive technology solutions emerging can strengthen and respect creative cultural ownership and diverse ways of knowing. 

The island of Ambae in Vanuatu, home to 11,000 people faced three evacuations due to the threat of volcanic eruption. Maurice Tarihimba, a young man who returned to Ambae after being evacuated in 2017,  had the idea to document the evacuation process and Ambae cultural heritage before the landscape of the island is changed forever. 

Maurice Tarihimba, a young man who returned to Ambae after being evacuated in 2017,  had the idea to document the evacuation process and Ambae cultural heritage before the landscape of the island is changed forever. The people’s Paramount Chief, Benuel Garae, the President of the Ambae Island Council of Chiefs, endorsed Maurice's idea and has invited Further Arts to support the community in documenting the stories of Ambae on their own terms as they face permanent evacuation.

Many Pacific communities face similar dramatic moves in their future. Cultural and communication networks designed by communities will support and strengthen cultural memory and diverse ways of knowing, vital intangible culture and alternative value exchange. Using traditional media capture as well as cutting edge Web VR on phones enables the use of 360 video, binaural audio recording, and photogrammetry to document stories, wisdom and the land itself.

Cascade Network is a knowledge sharing network designed with communities towards the creation of self-sovereign cultural and communication networks. Making use of emerging technologies like Mixed Reality, Web VR and blockchain, we explore techniques of 360 video, binaural audio recording, photogrammetry as well as more experimental interactive solutions to document stories, wisdom and oral tradition with techniques that emphasise embodied communication and the land. Each network is designed and owned by the community itself. 

We will use techniques that emphasise accessibility and embodied communication (eg. Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality, 360 Recordings and photogrammetry of the island itself) towards the making of an immersive web portal - accessible to mobile phones on Vanuatu - to hold and encourage cultural expression after permanent evacuation.

The Cascade Network is working with network technologies so that the specific value that a story creates can find digital life and also be inscribed in an object. These objects can be embedded with the coding of their own digital provenance creating possibilities for hybrid forms evolving craft practices and value exchange.

The design of this system allows for value to be attached to cultural products in ways that are being defined and determined locally (i.e by the Ambae people). The details of how this value exchange would be set up is community driven and there is flexibility inscribed which allows choices to be made around what to share and what not to share. For example, it is possible for the community to decide to release digital traceable objects reflective of craft whilst limiting access to recorded local knowledge, and sharing this with only the community network. 

Choice and consent is the domain of the community: the Cascade Network’s emphasis on local nodes and collaborative workshops is to strengthen the basis for a network of culture and knowledge on the terms and under the direction of the Ambae community.

The alternative currencies of Vanuatu - the trade of Shell Money on some islands and the pandanus practices indigenous to Ambae - encode a rich historical understanding of innovating value systems. Collaborative workshops already thrive on the islands and technical support can to support that community knowledge to direct the logic and design of a digital system to facilitate flows of cultural value.

The Cascade grew with strong relationships between the Leweton Community, Further Arts, TransArtAlliance, Intercreate and Hitnet and connects those working for arts, media and indigenous rights.

The Cascade Network puts cutting edge Immersive Communication techniques to the task of communicating embodied knowledge and puts technological innovation in service of indigenous sovereignty.

The Ambae community can design its own network to share place-based intangible cultural heritage. 

Through digital encoding of unique cultural heritage through an expansive and immersive interface, underpinned by a decentralised consensus technology we will develop the network transparently through best open source practices to encourage the best opportunities towards combining development and supporting flows of knowledge ethically.

The Cascade Network system looks to begin the process of designing with communities how the value that a story creates to be inscribed in an object. The object can be embedded with the coding of its own digital provenance allowing the community to design hybrid forms of cultural exchange evolving from traditional practices. Guided by our researcher Piyush Mann whose thesis work on Web-Based Platforms for the Digitization and Equitable Management of Ownership of Traditional Knowledge informs our approach. 

We have developed bespoke prototype technology built on open source RSA Public/Private key encryption, and utilising digital signatures and hash functions to establish and leverage digital provenance. This is essentially the same technology that underlies blockchain, but is open source and public, and can enable further features and flows of knowledge and value. Inherent within this work is creating with open tools that can allow for further evolutions and the potential for additional functionality to grow to support the community with network solutions.  

• The physical object itself is the output of dynamic processes of ICH (in other words: creative currency.)
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• The system does not exist to create assets for speculation on the Crypto markets, but to mirror and support the logic underpinning forms of creativity indigenous to Ambae eg. creating value through the weaving of pandanus mats.
• The value created facilitates the distributed allocation of resources and is operated by participants in the community.