User:C3/XPUB2/Project proposal 2
6. Relation to previous practice
#repurposing #old-devices #tactics #strategies #media-archeology #occupy
During SI26 we explored web-making as a craft (by working with html and css) and media archeology (by working with HPGL, Postscript, pen plotters and dot matrix printers).
Together with Charlie, Tessa and Eleni we overlapped these two topics for the SI project by focusing on a forgotten device from our past, the nintendo 3DS. We made a work on it by taking advantage of some outdated web-standards to show/hide information from other devices making our publication/puzzle/game solvable only through the use of the nintendo 3DS (important: we did not rely on emulation for the realization of the project, we just used simple HTML, CSS and vanilla JS).
The making of this work was a whole learning process. We had to get engaged with both hardware and software, this involved a lot of trail and error that culminated in a collection of strategies we wrote to make what we had in mind visible on the 3ds, but not on any other device.
It was a project about working within the limits, by occupying this object (like we did with the dot matrixes and plotters) we wanted to show that the devices that are catching dust at the corners of our lives are potentially interesting to work within, we wanted to invite people to get actively involved with things!
Terms Of Servers is a terminal based publication that runs on a temporary, communal server called cerealbox.
Working with the server for the first year of our studies evoked questions of its materiality and reliability...
...what we did not have time to solve is the way we could distribute our work, as the terminal is our main mode of interfacing with the server, we were wondering what would it mean to occupy this technical space to distribute our writing work (that is not just text it included some live commands).
<pre> 4 Why do you want to make it? </pre>
Cheatsheets are compact and lightweight, easy to jump in, they are interesting to me because they are a conduit to transfer "knowledge"(clarify knowledge), they travel a lot trough time as well because they constantly get duplicated, rewritten, screenshotted, redesigned etc.
During my first year I learned a lot of things that I wanted to engage with for a long time (mostly bash and python scripting and the general programming thoughts).
It was a long repetitive and iterative process and it was, for the most part, solitary. ...
I expressed interest in distributing and sharing knowledge, I envisioned the server last year as a potential
1 What do you want to make?
2 How do you plan to make it?
Via tought experiments connected to drawings, annotating, mapping and distribution.
3 What is your timetable?
Nov/Dec: asking people around what is a cheatsheet or a cheat for them, I am interested in the technical one but it could also be more broad in general, to really go through the method rather than the content.
5 Who can help you and how?
7 Relation to a larger context
8 References/bibliography