About
What we called surfing, we now call sharing. What was once cyberspace and The Net are now platforms. All of these are metaphors, but we might be less likely to notice them as such, because this is how dominant metaphors work – as infrastructures.
N. Markham, Annette, Weidenberg, Katrin (Ed.), Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity, Peter Lang Publishing, New York 2020, p. 9.
From Net, City, World to Cloud, Market, Sea investigates how we narrate and imagine the Internet with the help of metaphors. Net stands for the relations between various forms of infrastructure; City conceives cyberspace as an urban and social site; World focuses on utopias beyond the laws of physics and politics; Cloud marks the Internet as an ephemeral and decentralized repository; Market zeroes in on the commercialization of Web3; and Sea opens up the metaphor of water for the digital data stream.
On the basis of these six terms, the project traces various narratives, experiences, and points of historicity of the Internet. It moves from the overarching metaphors of the Internet to concrete visual manifestations and attempts to historicize the Internet and its linguistic imaginaries.
From Net, City, World to Cloud, Market, Sea is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin and takes place in collaboration with /rosa, diffrakt zentrum für theoretische peripherie e.V. und panke.gallery. The project entails a publication, a reading group, a workshop, and six public events.
Market Place of Beliefs
Presentation, embodiment exercises, and intuitive board game
Sometimes it feels like the internet is all about money. But just like any other metaphor, the market-centered side of the online sphere had to establish itself first: What initially started as individual shops (indeed, Amazon used to be an online bookstore) turned into selling platforms that are now deeply entwined with the structure of the internet. In OMSK Social Club’s board game, you can trace the euphoria and frustration of the crypto craze. The game conceives the online stock and crypto market in terms of mysticism and, conversely, it creates a connection between money and transcendent practices—from religion to superstition to magic. Together, we’ll play Market Place of Believes, an intuitive board game which might lead to a cautionary tale being told or a holy grail of data.
OMSK Social Club is a stewarded practice of collective storytelling. It involves a specific immersive improvised methodology which they coined in 2017 as Real Game Play, encompassing collective immersion and speculative worlding. From these live iterations, they harvest media relics such as films, scripts, and large scale video installations invoking states and gateways that could potentially be fiction, or an as of yet unlived reality.
The Oceanic: The Materiality of Data Flows
Reading and discussion
As a sight of wideness, the sea sparks dreams and desires as well as it harbors dangers and risks. From the very beginning of the internet, the metaphor of the sea was persistent and, as the recent hype around fluidity and its terminology shows, it still is. In conversation with Lotte Warnsholdt and Mathias Denecke we will look at the rhetoric of liquefaction and its pitfalls. Confronting the data flow with the materialities and conditions of its movement we will unmask the underlying exploitation of resources, human labor, and nature. Departing from the sea as the physical place for the internet and its infrastructures we will ask, what and who makes the internet actually run smoothly?
Mathias Denecke is a media scholar at Ruhr University Bochum and is interested in how talk of flows and fluidity shapes our experience of the contemporary world.
Lotte Warnsholdt is a cultural and media scholar. She has worked at various research and cultural institutions in Copenhagen, Lüneburg, Vienna, Bremerhaven, and Hamburg. Her research interests include the media history of modernity, practices of care, and forms of critique in the digital sphere.
House, Home, Home Page
Immersive lecture
In the nineties, when the personal computer entered private homes, it felt like a spatial extension of the living room, the office table, or the cellar computer station. As soon as computers got connected to the internet new ideas about what this space could be came into play. The early users did not just explore these new places,they built them; In her immersive talk Olia Lialina takes us on a dive through the cities, neighborhoods, buildings and dwellings of GeoCities, nineties legendary free hosting service. As Lialina shows us, it is no coincidence that ‘homepage’ implies the ‘home,’ since many of the early websites were designed as houses shaping the fantasy of an urban space online.
Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the nineties net.art scene—an early days, network-based pioneer of the arts. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. In this century, her continuous and close attention to internet architecture, ‘net.language,’ and vernacular web has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Lialina is credited with founding Art Teleportacia, one of the earliest web galleries. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Archive, author of Digital Folklore (2009) and Turing Complete User (2021), professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, and an animated GIF model.
Love is a City in Anguish
reading and talk
The metaphor of the city creates the fantasy of a physical place online where people can meet, giving the illusion that the internet will help to bring us together—if not online, then at least offline while navigating through the actual city. In conversation with Omar Kasmani we will retrace how moving in the city is closely interwoven with the internet. It is the blend of social media, messengers, and dating apps with actual distances and places that is characteristic of our city lives and loves. At the intersection of the urban and the virtual, where the pleasure and the drama of intimacy, love, politics and anything in between unfolds, Kasmani takes us on a personal journey through Berlin, a city that is at once a love-like relationship, a break-up, and an old companion who betrays.
Omar Kasmani is a transdisciplinary thinker and writer based in Berlin. Across fields of cultural anthropology, affect theory, and queer-of-color critique, his research and writing tackle ideas of intimacy, post-migrant be/longing, and queer worldmaking. He is the author of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan published in 2022 by Duke University Press. His current book project turns to the self as a public archive of daily loves and migrant un/feeling in Berlin.
‘My Favourite Part Was the Whole Thing’: YouTube, the Comments Section, and Coming Together by Misusing Digital Space
Interactive lecture
At first, the net might not seem like a metaphor at all because it describes the shape of the connections between computers. However, it comes with a particular state and feeling of how it is to be online. After all, it’s not just the computers, servers and routers connected to each other but the users—a whole net culture.
Comments sections, nearly as old as the web itself, have changed over time. Initially a place for discussion, exchange, and feedback, they have turned into a ‘dump bottom half of the internet,’ dominated by trolls, bots, misinformation, or hate speech. Therefore, many forums and platforms started to employ moderation policies, some even deciding to disable the comments section completely. Yet, as Orit Gat shows us, there are still places of empathetic and intimate connections, gatherings, and get-togethers that are profoundly human, even though they take place on one of the biggest and highly commercialized platforms.
Orit Gat is a British writer and art critic living in London. Her work about contemporary art, culture, digital culture, and football has appeared in various magazines, including The White Review, frieze, e-flux, Jacobin, and many others. She is currently working on a nonfiction book titled If Anything Happens, which looks at football (soccer) as a prism through which to explore questions of immigration, nationalism, race, gender, money, love, and the possibility of belonging.
Stretch to Zoom
Interactive lecture
Rather than existing inside, or next to the AFK (away from keyboard) life, a ‘worldly’ understanding of the internet replaces it, or at least is trying to do so. Online, you can build utopias that might feel like liberations from real life’s restraints. However, the internet is still deeply rooted in IRL (in real life) places. Kendal Beynon creates a cartography of those places, linking them to the ecosystems of online communities: She starts at the privacy of a bedroom and zooms out further and further. Leaving the seemingly convenient lives on mainstream platforms behind, she encourages us to explore territories where we might start as tourists but will eventually attain something like self-discovery.
Kendal Beynon, is an online and inhabiting virtual worlds since 2004, is a Rotterdam-based artist and PhD researcher at CSNI in partnership with The Photographer’s Gallery, London. Her work is situated in the realm of experimental publishing and internet culture. She aims to rediscover an alternative online landscape through DIY ethos, computational publishing, and community building, while also examining the ruins of our digital past. She received an MA degree in experimental publishing from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, with the thesis Cyberhotels and Other Tales of Forgotten Virtual Worlds. She is heavily engaged with the zine-making community, hosting workshops, co-organizing the Rotterdam-based zine festival Zine Camp, and creating a community of old web afi cionados at Dead Web Club.
Book
The internet is in a constant state of flux, with both hardware and software constantly changing. We can rarely recognise these different temporalities on our screens - the digital material never fades. Our experiences on the internet and the stories we tell ourselves about them are likewise transforming. But like the digital material, we are rarely aware of the shifts in language.
The Storytelling-Kit invites artists, authors and theorists to use the metaphors Net, City, World, Cloud, Market, Sea to trace the stories of the internet, to dig into the layers of the internet. Three commissioned contributions per metaphor reflect the linguistic technique of visualisation and take up the expectations of the respective image area.
The concept and design is orientated towards experimental literature, such as the adventure book and post-structuralist novel, and invites the reader to collectively read aloud, play and retell.
With contributions by Kendal Beynon, Matthias Bickenbach, Joachim Blank, Andreas Bülhoff, Mathias Denecke, Tim Etchells, Orit Gat, Omar Kasmani, Olia Lialina, Geert Lovink, Harun Maye, Cassie McQuater, OMSK Social Club, Evan Roth, Mario Santamaría, Afrah Shafiq, Andrea Sick, Molly Soda, Julian Stallabrass, Lotte Warnsholdt.
Narrating the Internet
Writing Workshop
We tell many stories about life, but what kind of stories do we actually tell about the Internet? Which net-experiences, phenomena and tropes are forgotten over time, and which new ones emerge and why?
Can the Internet be narrated at all? Which adversities do we encounter when we try it? With the help of writing exercises and text examples we want to approach those questions and find words for the stories and narratives the WWW might has to offer. One thing is for sure: in the digital space we can draw from a large pool of language, because it is full of metaphors: An Email is sent as a paper airplane, we surf, and our data is stored in clouds.
Together we want to explore the political and literary potential of Internet stories, from virtual pony farms to booktok. No previous knowledge is required, except an interest in cyberspace. The workshop is free of charge and can be held in English and/or German based on the participants needs and wishes.
Metaphors we click by
Reading Group
The Internet is full of metaphors. Our use of language, the descriptions of our everyday applications and experiences of the Internet, are incredibly figurative: we stream films and series, store data in the cloud, teach AI as if it were a child and construct fantastic worlds in video games. The Reading Group “Metaphors we click by” wants to explore these images: their historicity, their influence on our notions of the Internet, their technical manifestations. Together with interested people, we want to read various texts (German/English), visit websites, and discuss our own use of the Internet. We will meet weekly from 21.02.2024 (6 dates in total) in the project room.
