Soft Detours ↯ Kyra Ocean

Computing Arts • Net Culture • Hypermedia • Cyberfeminism with KYRA OCEAN ⌭⌬⌮⌲⌾

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SOFT MEMORY ❯ I would always leave this demoscene animation/song looping on my bedroom PC in 1995. (Ambience by Tran • 1994)

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Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machines Eva and Franco Mattes 2000 / 70 x 50 × 13cm Hand assembled computer, Biennale.py virus, Windows 2000, anti virus software, plexiglass

Biennale.py is a computer virus we created—with hackers group Epidemic—for the 49th Venice Biennale. Released on the night of the opening, it quickly spread around the world.

Immaterial and self-replicating, when the virus enters a computer it stays there, hidden, trying to survive for as long as possible.

<http://0100101110101101.org/biennale-py/>

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How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History

Preserving online media is a growing logistical and ethical question. But doing so may completely transform the way we remember the past.

As an Internet archivist/researcher, my work involves the pre-web era (1980–94). The archives that exist for that are mostly text-based with Usenet being the motherlode along with supplements from others (FidoNet, Gopher, isolated BBS archives, etc). It's far from a complete record and yet it provides great insight—the ability to zero on specific cultural events and glimpse how Internet users were reacting as they happened.

I often get asked about what should be preserved from today's Internet. I lean towards something omnivorous and there are numerous groups (Internet Archive, Archive Team, Rhizome) capturing what they can. It's a loaded question that affects all of us [and how our history is perceived after we're gone]—Jenna Wortham does an excellent job of digging in.

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In his 1990 movie, Graffiti Bridge, Prince used a Macintosh SE to work on the track “Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got.”

Read more at Stories of Apple →

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A perfect, minute-long survey of 1980s/90s computer animation created by Brummbaer for SIGGRAPH '95.

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The groundbreaking computer animator and artist Brummbaer has left us today (1945–2016). His diverse practice started in the 1960s with pavement painting, psychedelic poster design, and light shows for Amon Düül II, Frank Zappa, Tangerine Dream, etc. By the 1970s, he was running an underground comix company and had translated/edited Robert Crumb’s first book into German.

With the 1980s, he discovered his most expressive medium—the computer. He was a prolific computer artist with innumerable animations as well as digital paintings (a master of Deluxe Paint). He also created SFX for Johnny Mnemonic and a CG history retrospective for SIGGRAPH '95. Several health battles came with the 2000s but he continued to create and publish two autobiographical books. In describing Brummbaer during a 1992 interview: 

Ever modest with regard to the magic that he spins, Brummbaer says that his philosophy of creativity stems from his notion that an artist is but a humble window washer. His computer screen, he claims, is simply a window that allows him to see through into other worlds, and all he does is polish the screen so that we can see through to the other side.

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Selected illustrations from the Silicon Graphics TechPubs Library (1995-2000).

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22 years, 2 months, 2 days, and 2 hours later: Apple IIGS System 6.0.2 has been released.  This update is thrilling not only for adding functionality to an ancient operating system but also because it’s authors (rumored to be European) are uncredited and working in secret.

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Self-archaeology by the perennially brilliant Steven K. Roberts: 

…here was my living room in April, 1978 (photo by Doug Fowley for my Byte magazine article about polyphonic keyboard interface design). So many memories in this photo, including hours of cranking out graphics with the period in that Diablo daisy wheel printer, the acoustic coupler, my trusty HP-35, a homebrew memory-mapped S100 display for the Z-2D, external sockets for the Bytesaver, the trusty Advent cassette deck, a Hazeltine monitor that cost more than current laptops, and that lovely Tek 465 scope with the DM43 on top. Good times!

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In 1984, Steven Levy captured a thrilling moment for computer users and software history—the rise of spreadsheets. He recently republished that article for the 35th anniversary of VisiCalc. 

Some will lose themselves in the rows of columns, the grids becoming their windows on the world. They will spend their evenings in front of their computers, the dark dimly lit by the glow of green phosphorescent numbers, fiddling with scenarios, trying to make the profit line perfect.

Read the The Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge (1984) →

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Life Sharing by Eva and Franco Mattes (2000–03).

For Life Sharing we turned our private lives into a public artwork. We made each and every file on our computer, from texts and photos to bank statements and emails, available to anyone at any time through our website. Anything on our computer was available to search, read and freely copy, including the system itself, since we were using only free software.

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Wandering through lost computer worlds for an hour or two, taking screenshots like a tourist. Shutting one virtual machine down with a sigh, then starting up another one. But while these machines run, I am a kid. A boy on a porch, back among his friends.

Paul Ford, Networks Without Networks (2014)

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Into the Future! The Making of “Beyond Cyberpunk!” tells the entire story of this essential and influential software from 1991.

Beyond Cyberpunk! was divided into four zones: Manifestos, Media, Street Tech, and Cyberculture. Each zone contained essays, reviews, artwork, animations, and sounds. There were over 600 “cards,” over 300 articles, 122 different sound clips, 19 animations, and 35 text pop-ups. There was also a glossary with vocal pronunciations, and a 1000-word hyperlinked index.

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From Machine Studies by Sarah Caluag (2014)

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“How Coolness Defined the World Wide Web of the 1990s” via The Atlantic explains how crucial awards were to early net culture.

These recognitions were regarded as welcomed honors, visually stamped on the distinguished site with a graphical status icon that bestowed a mark of “quality.” Accumulate enough of these accolades and new awards.html pages would be erected to showcase the entire collection.

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Any Color You Want by John Pound (2014). Read more at Wired about how “the guy behind Garbage Pail Kids has been cartooning with code for 20 years.”

John Pound started his code cartooning journey in the late ’80s by teaching himself PostScript, an Adobe-made programming language used for commercial printing. He coaxed it to draw some rudimentary scenes. They were just a few shapes against a horizon line at that point, but the artist found the results fascinating nonetheless.

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Computer Virus Catalog curated by Bas Van De Poel (2014–). Artist interpretations of the greatest viruses from computer history.