Solar Protocol

Solar Protocol is a web platform hosted across a network of solar-powered servers set up in different locations around the world. A solar-powered server is a computer that is powered by a solar panel and a small battery. Each server can only offer intermittent connectivity that is dependent on available sunshine, the length of day and local weather conditions. When connected as a network, the servers coordinate to serve a website from whichever of them is enjoying the most sunshine at the time.

The Metaverse Won’t Involve Mark Zuckerberg

“Zuckerberg will still be working on his smart home screens, Habbo Hotel rip-off Zoom calls, and budget Apple Watches, while young people are busy actually building a new internet, haphazardly, out of protocols that are free, easy-to-use, and the most convenient — Bluetooth, WiFi, video calls, free messaging clients, open source maps, QR codes, and the blockchain. And we will interact with this new metaverse on devices that we already own for a while. Then, slowly, new features will be added to help us interface with it better. Wireless bluetooth earbuds, smart watches, and phones will become more seamlessly integrated. They’ll have longer batteries, faster charging, brighter screens, better cameras, more wellness tools, and maybe eventually small projectors. We will create new user behaviors that companies will have to adapt to and then facilitate.

And there is no version of that where Facebook, or Meta, will be a key player. It is simply too big for them to dominate and, more importantly, it is already happening on Twitch, on Discord, and on TikTok. Zuckerberg is right. The metaverse is here, but it is has already left Facebook behind”.

Network TV, museums and pot

Nam June Paik’s predictions on #television, #museums and #drugs.

[source: Letter to Messrs Lloyd and Klein (“It was a heavy earthquake … “), Dated February 10,1971. Typescript (copy) with handwritten notes in ink. Two single-sided pages, each: 10% x 8V2 in. (27.3 x 21.6 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive (Box 2, Folder 18); Gift of the Nam June Paik Estate. ONLINE HERE]

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.