The Birth of the Internet Archive

“25 years ago, the entire World Wide Web was only 2.5 terabytes in size. Most connections were dial-up, important records were stored on tape, and a young engineer named Brewster Kahle was working on a revolutionary project—a way to archive the growing Internet.

Filmed by Marc Weber for the Web History Project, this video showcases the Internet Archive’s very first web crawl in 1996. In 2001, the project was made accessible to the public through the Wayback Machine. Today, the Internet Archive is home to more than 588 billion web pages, as well as 28 million books and texts, 14 million audio items, and 580,000 software titles, making us one of the world’s largest digital libraries.”

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The Nostalgia Onion

“It’s not about being nostalgic for the 90s, nor is it about being nostalgic for the early-2010s. Instead, it’s about being nostalgic for being in the early-2010s being nostalgic for the 90s. It’s a lot to wrap your head around.”

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Inside Inside


“Created by Douglas Edric Stanley, Inside Inside is an interactive installation remixing video games and cinema. In between, a neural network creates associations from its artificial understanding of the two, generating a film in real-time from gameplay using images from the history of cinema.”

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4004

“2021 marks the 50th year since the invention of the 4004 – the world’s first Monolithic CPU and microprocessor. This incredible invention is barely known outside of CPU collector circles, but there’s no reason it should be any less famous than the lightbulb, or the atomic bomb. It was an extraordinary feat of miniaturization which revolutionized computer design and made personal computing a reality. It paved the way for everything in our digital world.”

David OReilly, “4004,” 2021

memeclassworldwide

“This might come as a surprise, but memeclassworldwide is not focused on teaching internet meme culture in art school. The idea has never been to guide art students in becoming memelords crossposting shitpics for virtual likes. memeclassworldwide makes this ever changing thematic field accessible to artists-in-training from all disciplines and helps them find entry into the mutation of languages in images, text, and aesthetic and political discourses that originate on the web.”

memeclassworldwide

Rest is resistance

“The “Lying Flat” movement taking hold among young people in China involves doing exactly what it suggests: working little, resting a lot, and cultivating the most minimalist lifestyle possible.”

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RGBFAQ

RGBFAQ, by Alan Warburton, traces the trajectory of computer graphics from WW2 to Bell Labs in the 1960s, from the visual effects studios of the 1990s to the GPU-assisted algorithms of the latest machine learning models.

Heal Hitler

POV: You are Hitler’s psychologist in 1925. Diagnose his complexes by using both Jungian and Freudian psychotherapy and attempt to heal him. Resolve Hitler’s trauma and prevent catastrophe via therapy and psychology. Succeed and avoid the war and holocaust.

Heal Hitler – The videogame

The Sonic Side of TikTok

“A Brief Sonic Ecological Survey of TikTok Meme Culture“, by Max Alper. A super interesting article on sound based memes on TikTok:

“All of the above styles of TikTok audio are made by users intentionally using top of the line social media tools somewhat incorrectly, at least according to the developers of the technology. Of course you’re not supposed to stick your earbud mic down your throat, just as you’re not supposed to scream at the top of your lungs through a fancy autotune filter or apply scotch tape directly to the grill of a condenser mic. Perhaps it’s by using these audio tools in unexpectedly “wrong” ways that young people continue to keep it fresh; the more extreme and unexpected the sound is, the more “based” it can be. I’ve been told that’s a good thing.”

Synthetic Messenger

Synthetic Messenger

“Synthetic Messenger is a botnet that artificially inflates the value of climate news. Everyday it searches the internet for news articles covering climate change. Then 100 bots visit each article and click on every ad they can find”.

And you can watch them live on Zoom while they do so.
Great project by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne.