The Internet
“[Artists] have to start understanding the anatomy of machines, the language of machines, their nature, and to re-route them into functioning in irregular ways to create works of art with the machines themselves, using their own means.”
— Bruno Munari: 1938 Manifesto del Macchinismo
The Cloud
It’s easy to think of the internet lacking any anatomy. It seems immaterial, with our common language around online activities like “virtual” sessions hosted in the “cloud.”)
Even “technical” diagrams in patents symbolize the internet as amorphous blobs, as shown in these patent drawings collected by Noah Veltman.
In reality, however, there is massive physical infrastructure that powers the universe of our disembodied selves. This NYT map documents the labor involved in setting up these gigantic cables, and maps a timeline of underwater cable development; moreover, it showcases how their ownership is increasingly consolidated by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Trevor Paglen’s undersea cable photo series challenges us to consider how much of the data for the U.S. Government, or the N.S.A., also passes through these cables.
The obscurity of the shape of the internet is intentional: it is notoriously difficult to find the square footage of data centers occupied by Amazon and Google. Because once we can witness these concrete manifestations of the internet, we can also begin to understand the sheer extent of their hegemonic sovereignty.
You don’t need training in submarine navigation and underwater photography for this. In her guide Networks of New York, An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure, Ingrid Burrington helps us identify the markers of internet infrastructure, such as manhole covers and street markings, that are present in the local urban fabric. It’s a great project that signifies that simply looking closely reveals residues of the internet, everywhere.
The “cloud” has become a term used by corporate entities to advertise the convenience of an infinite and globally accessible storage solution — when it is only an euphemism for the massive quantities of data they own and exploit for profit-making. As they are catching onto this social awareness, we’ve been hearing news that data centers are switching to running on renewables. This is definitely a good thing, but the real problem here is how our extent of data consumption is changing.
Our Consumption
As we can see from this graph that charts average page size over the last 10 years, the number of bytes increased by over 300% on desktop and 1200% on mobile. Much of this has to do with the increased prevalence of video in today’s content consumption.
It’s not just the amount of energy we need to store, say, the all 342 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix — this also means that we need more energy to transport these bytes from servers to computers, and that we also need newer, faster computers. You could see that the gap between desktop and mobile devices has also narrowed — as our mobile devices become more robust, platforms begin to tailor their content for their capacities, and legacy devices become more rapidly obsolete.
Cloud computing has also made activities that used to be offline, such as writing documents and listening to music, to something that is now constantly powered online. Not to mention that with the rise of the Internet of Things, nothing is now exempt from the need to be connected: cars, lightbulbs, refrigerators are sharing data just like we do, even while you sleep.
Ingrid Burrington captures this concisely when she says, “The Cloud optimizes for real-time, not geologic time.” Rather than expanding our concerns to long term consequences, our timescale of attention is shrinking to the immediate microsecond.
The crux of this problem is not one about technology, but the way our society adopts it and adapts to it. No matter how so-called eco-friendly our tools become, if they are enabling the same kind of consumption patterns, we are not reducing their impact. The Rebound effect points to how if something becomes more energy efficient, and thus cheaper, we end up using more of it. A prototypical example is how someone might drive more frequently or to farther distances with a more fuel-efficient car.
Code literacy as resistance
And the use of this increased “efficiency” is clear. If machines were threatening Munari’s world, it is now the surveillance capitalism codified in our digital devices that threatens ours.
Every corporate-controlled, hegemony-hosted platform has an ability to capitalize our the way we use their tools and services.
Even before the pandemic, the distribution of information and ideas have become increasingly reliant on the web. This has popularized templated frameworks, such as Cargo Collective and Squarespace, that allows anyone to build websites without the knowledge of code. To some extent, this is really great!
However, these templating systems embody a particular company’s ideas on what a functional, beautiful website should be. As designers, we should develop our own ideas about the web. Artists and designers have traditionally established an intimate relationship with their material — whether oils, wood, glass — and designers today must be unafraid to examine and work with the raw material of the web, or code — that’s why I think learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is so empowering.
Web infrastructures
Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, launched The World Wide Web Project in 1989. The project was initially created to streamline distribution of information among scientists around the world. Berners-Lee devised the system of hypertext (or links.) This first website was dedicated to host information about the World Wide Web itself.
The internet is a network of connected computers with the primary purpose to share information. It works as bunch of conversations between clients and servers.
Web Client
Browser (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc..)
Web Server
Internet-connected computers running server software, serving web documents as requested. Most websites live in a shelf on a server farm.
The hypertext protocol (http) allows computers to access files on other computers (servers) and display them in the browser.
Back in 1960, Ted Nelson had proposed another alternative model for the internet named Xanadu — this model fundamentally sdiffered from the current model by using two-way linking. Read more on The Curse of Xanadu.
Another notable interface is Muriel Cooper’s Information Landscapes. In 1994, she presented a new dimensional interface for navigating digital media. She was one of the pioneers in conceptualizing the design of interactive information. Read more on a overview by Nolwenn Maudet.
Web as medium
From the begining stage of the web, artists embraced the browser as a platform, ranging from personal expression, or abstract painting. Artists could even used the infrastracture of the web itself (See also: Alexander R. Galloway: Jodi’s Infrastructure).
It is in this spirit that we will engage in typographic explorations.
Our material
3 essential technologies (front-end web development) determines what we see and interact with on the web.
- Content in HTML /
.html - Form in CSS /
.css - Behavior in Javascript /
.js
Back-end technologies are used to compile several sources of the website together, whether through a database or static site generator. CMS (content management systems) like Wordpress are an example of systems that integrate all of this: how the information is collected, stored, and compiled into a website.
In our class, we will be focusing on frontend languages to develop the skills needed to shape text within the browser.