| list [image] |
detail |
'list' = tldr + images
'detail' = full workshop script
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The 'list' column of this table provides a simplified, outline ('tldr') version of the 'detail' column when helpful and optional images.
The 'detail' column of this table plays the role of a script that guides us through this workshop today. It also serves as an equitable reference point for people who don't have access to attending this workshop IRL or are interested in revisiting this workshop in a more personal way.
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"Life in 256KB: a workshop about data footprints and the solar web" is a personal archive and an interactive workshop
created by Bri Griffin, community designer +
strategist, @ rhizome for Gray Area Festival 10
This is the second version of the workshop, updated
and expanded for ITERATIONS -- but it is still a WIP !!
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smol net art diagram c:
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✎ (❁ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈) ༉‧ ♡*.✧
Life in 256kb would not be possible without rhizome.org ,
support from the tieger foundation, solar protocol, and
advice from mark beasley regarding file sizes.
A talk about this workshop, hosted by ONX, was briefly
mentioned in this Brooklyn Rail article.
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This website is intended to be used as a syllabus or workbook and as a place for exploration! Workshop participants are encouraged to explore links, diverge paths, and modify this website as they see fit.
It is (gently) technical. ♡
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dig into environmental footprint of the web
movements and projects that challenge tech
examples of alt-tech in the real-world
resources for creating a solar-friendly website
mini-web jam !
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For live participants, this workshop is approximately 2 hours.
We'll begin with an introduction that walks through a bit of my personal relationship with data, followed by quotes and resources related to the environmental footprint of the web, and an exploration of some of my favorite projects, communities and collectives seeking out alternative technological perspectives. Throughout, we will explore resources and strategies for creating assets (optimized for a solar web).
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0. A personal history
a radical community + art school life = bri
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Hi! I'm Bri ~ I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. Most of my life (until college) was spent alternating between my grandmothers' community center of a beauty salon and attending incredible,
experimental public schools that I believe was the best arts education in the world, with plenty of early exposure to logic puzzles, the literary greats, and observational studies!
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| university adventures in radical sound
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Somehow I ended up going to college, suddenly I found myself surrounded by tech optimists, radical media theorists, open source developers, and independent radio. Laurie Anderson would often appear as an artist-in-residence. Oneohtrix Point Never developed and premiered the show for R Plus Seven at EMPAC. We all would flock to deep listening workshops. Occasionally, Pauline would ask me to document her classes.
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can we imagine a future that doesn't suck?
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After college, I spent years working at an international architectural consulting firm imagining alternatives and 'experiences' for major coporations, luxury brands, and private large-scale urban developments.
My personal frustrations grew with my client list. Clients would demand large-scale, 'advanced' technologies but there was rarely a budget to tell a proper story. The 'metrics' of success were always based on suspciously gathered pools of data.
"Well, bigger doesn’t imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don’t know what’s going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax. This is not the norm and should not become the norm. Overweight apps should mean a red flag. They should mean run away scared."
- Niki Tonsky, Software disenchantment
Maintenence was more expensive then destroying and rebuilding a new project. Eventually we began work on one of the highest budget sustainablity projects in the world but, of course, it was being built on previously never developed land.
This was a breaking point.
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it seems like everything is breaking down..
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In the background of my memories of Mississippi, is a complex story of ecological disaster. Growing up, I never drank tap water. During Hurricane Katrina, most of my families homes' were destroyed. I remember not being allowed to go near the ocean after the BP Oil Spill. An overwhelming amount of the people I love face negative socio-environmental-induced health effects.
Troy, NY was another story. Like many places in the north-east, it was a post-industrial ruins.
Those fancy architectural projects that involved technology were broken within the same year they opened.
So, what was next??
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There are people all over the world who care,
and have cared for a very long time ! ♡
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Over the past 5 years, I read as much as I could about sustainability and technology, documenting things I read on an are.na board titled 'speculative-ecologies'. I started a discord with teaching artist Sofy Pujol for the purpose of advocating for "open knowledge and learning". I began participating transformative discord of "utopian conspirators", trust.support. I co-organized an internet-nased web art creation festival. I began working at rhizome.org |
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i grew up with low tech !!
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Things like early arcade games and , emulated MS-DOS games, chiptune, demos, zines, character creation, and tiddlywiki have brought me endless joy.
I wonder how did we transition to a few pixels that could fully immerses someone for dozens of hours to millions of pixels barely catching someone's attention for half a second..
At what point was this normalized??
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1. The environmental footprint of the web
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Countercultural publications, such as the Whole Earth Catalog and People's Computer Company, were within blocks of Stanford Research Institute's human-computer-interaction engineers.
Fred Turner covers these relationships in more depth, "Countercultural ideals of decentralization and personalization" have heavily influenced high-technology research since "before computers were miniaturized or widely interlinked."
There was a belief that personal computing and access to networked technology might aid in their movements.
"Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them; Time to change all that"
- Peoples Computer Company,
Issue No 1
In 1984, Apple Macintosh were marketed as devices one could use to tear down bureaucracies and achieve individual intellectual freedom.
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technology is broken because everything is broken |
The internet of today is something much different than imagined.
It's common knowledge that the networked technologies we use, also enable punishment, mass surveillance, censorship, discrimination, addiction, distraction, and control.
"But instead of leading to more
equitable distributions of wealth and influence, instead of enabling
the emergence of a richer variety in modes of living and practices of
freedom, the deluge of screens and spectacles undermines political
opportunity and efficacy for most of the world’s peoples."
- Jodi Dean, Communicative Capitalism
Computing has never been equally distributed.
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communication no longer means what it's supposed to.. |
Communication has been de-coupled from it's original form. 'Interacting' online can easily feel meaningless, overwhelming, and lonely.
"...the message is simply
part of a circulating data stream. Its particular content is irrelevant.
Who sent it is irrelevant. Who receives it is irrelevant. That it need be
responded to is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is circulation,
the addition to the pool...how a contribution circulates determines whether it had been
accepted or rejected.""
- Jodi Dean, Communicative Capitalism
Yet despite this, more content than ever is being created, streamed, and replicated. There is an overwhelmingly meaningless pool of information that increasingly is being created for and by bots/AI.
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i have a massive footprint, thousands and thousands of data points.. but so many of us do ;-; |
As I type this, I have 64,047 images and videos in my iphone (or even more accurately, in my icloud that I pay $10.99 a month for). I have two google cloud subscriptions that contain rapidly dupicated archives from forgotten thinkpads (literally just needs the battery replaced) and recovered college projects. I have countless accounts throughout the web (not including all the thoughtless google-authentication) and somewhere (i'm unable to find it), I have a document where I attempted to document the difficulty (or impossibility) of deleting accounts from various platforms.
Even if we might seek to 'escape', some platforms haven't designed that function.
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innovation is over |
Instead of 'fixing' networked technology, modern computing amplified (and continues to extend upon) already existing emergencies.
"Yet in the midst of all this abundant supply, homelessness is rising both for humans and the non-humans whose habitats are destroyed or polluted. The specter of resourcelessness looms ever larger on the horizon as we reach the limits of a planet that had once been imagined as an infinite container of resources, now revealed as a finite resource itself."
- Zoe Sofia, Container Technologies
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expansion is over
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“"humanity is rapidly approaching, or has already exceeded, a variety of planet-scale limits related to the global climate system, fossil fuels, raw materials, and biocapacity" .... "current and near-future ecological, material, and energy limits; the ways new forms of computing may help support well-being while living within these limits""
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| expanding file sizes, but even more rapidly expanding software dependencies
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
BMB------------------------------------B B
BBB------------------------------------BBB
BBB------------------------------------BBB
BBB------------------------------------BBB
BBB------------------------------------BBB
BBB------------------------------------BBB
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
BBBBB+++++++++++++++++BBBBBB
BBBBB++BBBBB++++++++++BBBBBB
BBBBB++BBBBB++++++++++BBBBBB
BBBBB++BBBBB++++++++++BBBBBB
BBBBB+++++++++++++++++BBBBBB
[ascii floppy disk]
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And on top of everything else, The platforms and websites that we use to experience the endless stream of content are getting significantly worse.
"As a general trend, we’re not getting faster software with more features. We’re getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features”…“our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro"
- Niki Tonsky, Software disenchantment
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a happy distraction ~
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If the front-end works, most people never consider that the backend is chaos. That the computing industry is chaos. That the world is chaos.
"A well-designed, frictionless digital experience means that users don’t need to worry about what happens behind the scenes and, by extension, the consequences."
- Halden Lin, Aishwarya Nirmal, Shobhit Hathi, Lilian Liang, The Hidden Cost of Digital Consumption
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Yet, behind every computing transaction is a material weight.
"The Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force...“To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives.”
"
- Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage
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There's an illusion of Limitless Data
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“"In a time when taking these snapshots takes very little energy, time, or judgement, our ability to discover, recall, and properly sort our collected memories is impaired."
- Honor Ash, Should Data Expire?
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And this weight, continues to exponential expand alongside each new wave.
"one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations."
-Kate Crawford, Generative AI is guzzling
water and energy
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Challenging Innovation
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“So if you innovate and the result is some technology that increases energy use by a factor of 20 then maybe that innovation is not so innovative after all, and that’s a big thing. What we call “innovation” these days usually results in something that uses more energy.”
- Kris De Decker, Imagining a Solar-Powered Internet |
2. Thinking outside of the current landscape
Challenging the use of the word 'technology'
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Natural Cycles
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"in a decentralised direct solar approach, the intelligence is provided by the sun and the rotation of the planet"
- Kris De Decker, Low-Tech Mag writings
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The Demo Scene
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“The Demo Scene is described as being "made by hand, distributed as semi open source, and executed in real-time." composers adapt to technical limitations, as well as cultural conditions, where resources are ofter reserved for the visual content.”
- Anders Carlsson, A Micro History of Demoscene Music |
permacomputing
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Permacomputing is a community of practice centered around issues that relate to resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology
inspired by permaculture
1. an ecosystem depends on diversity and interconnectedness in order to be resilient.
2. a combination of conceptual, material, and strategic components in order to benefit life in all forms.
ପໄଓ☾☼✫ -☆:*´
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Digital de-escalation
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aims at slowing down, stabilizing, or even decreasing the
digitization of our society. This requires not only reducing the
production of hardware but also fostering a collective detachment
from these technologies.
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Digital degrowth
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"There is a very urgent necessity to radically reduce energy and resource use, and think through the afterlife of technology, what happens to the devices once we no longer use them, NOT just to replace grey with green energy and continue with business as usual, or to only reduce energy use when little green energy is available."
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an aesthetics of what's available now
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What's possible if we combine our e-waste, our 'obsolete' tools, with all of what's currently available?
"..transition from a system in which practitioners use the latest digital tools and media regardless of the environmental consequences, to a more strategic system in which digital tools and media of all generations, are carefully combined, crafted and used to form a less extractive practice.""
"abandoned computing devices and e-waste" are "instruments waiting to be brought back to life, turned upside down and rediscovered to simply create new things" !
- Aymeric Mansoux, Brendan Howell, Dušan Barok, and Ville-Matias Heikkilä, Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture
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⁂ In many cases, we can use open source tools to reduce file size without a significant difference from the original file.
Let's re-imagine the maximum as default ! ⁂
∘°∘♡∘°∘
media optimization 03: making things smol !
∘°∘♡∘°∘
[ (●＞д＜)ノ : we now interrupt this color scheme for a short message from our sponsors!!!]
+
enter "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no watch.ascii.theater" into your terminal (CMD.EXE) for a surprise!
finally...
you should visit the
dithering museum !
| Handmaking the Web
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“web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.”
https://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html
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Solar Protocol
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Solar Protocol is a web platform hosted across a network of solar-powered servers set up in different locations around the world.
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windternet
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Windternet, a recently initiated
collaboration between two ongoing projects: Regenerative Energy
Communities (https://regenerative-energy-communities.org) and
Solar Internet (https://solarinternet.org/). Our collaboration focuses
on building practices for small-scale and low-powered solar-wind
microgeneration prototyping.
More often than not, the materials used to maintain off-gridness,
such as batteries and solar panels, depend on intensive resource
extraction, land grabbing and damage to soil dependent
ecosystems.
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| The Screenless Office
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a system for working with media and networks using paper-based output from old laser and receipt printers. A document camera, repurposed warehouse barcode scanners and simple buttons provide input.
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| Uxn + Noodle
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Uxn is a small virtual machine geared towards small graphical applications, being developed by Hundred Rabbits (has been implemented on Nintendo Gameboy Advance and the Raspberry Pi Pico)
Noodle, a 1-bit illustration program for the Uxn virtual machine |
| Making Critical Ethical Software
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“When technology components are easy to engage with, able to be both used and remixed, they create a diversity of projects as well as a diversity of community. It's revolutionary because it creates new spaces but also allows for the examination of processes, like traditional computer science, that once existed in the 'walled garden' of the academy.”
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