Sun Thinking is the first exhibition to be launched on the Solar Protocol network. It will be viewable at the following URL as of Saturday the 22nd of April.

→ solarprotocol.net/sunthinking/

Sun Thinking is an online group show that brings together artists and writers to explore some of the themes and questions central to the Solar Protocol. It includes new commissioned work, alongside experimental projects and texts that critically and playfully explore the qualities and characteristics of solar power as a medium, the materiality of computation, designing within planetary limits, and environmental perspectives on intelligence.

Artists and contributors are: Hakeem Adam, honor ash, Stephanie Dick, Marloes de Valk, Rory Gillen and Anna Madeleine Raupach, Felix Lenz, Mark Anthony Hernández Motaghy, Jen Liu, Kristin Lucas and Joe McKay, Anne Pasek, Allison Parrish, Everest Pipkin, Brian Sutherland, Roopa Vasudevan, Denzel Wamburu and Alice Yuan Zhang.

Curatorial team: Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, Benedetta Piantella and Kate Silzer.

We will be launching the exhibition in a  Saturday, April 22nd, from 12pm-2pm EST in a hybrid event (in person in Brooklyn, NYC and online). Details are here.

Solar Protocol consists of a network of small scale solar powered servers. We have developed custom networking software so that they can host a web platform that is generated and sent out from whichever server is in the most sunshine. In this way, the sun “programs” the network, determining how routing and computational work is distributed. We work with a diverse and distributed community of stewards who have installed and hosted servers in different locations and time zones across the world. The project is many things: it’s an experiment in community-run planetary-scale computing, it’s an artwork that poetically reimagines internet infrastructure, it’s an education platform for teaching about internet materiality, it’s a bespoke distributed cloud –perhaps what might be called a “data non-center”, and as this exhibition shows, it’s also a virtual, solar powered artist-run space.

Solar Protocol is a collaborative project by myself, Alex Nathanson, Benedetta Piantella and all of our stewards. Supported by a Mozilla Creative Media Award and the Integrated Design and Media department at New York University.

Project Page | Eventbrite

/++

Your Line or Mine – Crowd sourced animations at the Stedelijk Museum

‘Your Line or Mine’ is an interactive installation in the Stedelijk Museum comprised of three continually changing crowd sourced animations drawn entirely by the museum’s visitors.

Silk Pavillion – CNC Deposited Silk & Silkworm Construction at the MIT Media Lab

Project explores the relationship between digital and biological fabrication by using silk threads laid down by a CNC machine followed by a swarm of 6,500 silkworms spinning flat non-woven silk patches.

MAN-NAHĀTA – The land of many hills

In their continued effort to seek out an equilibrium between man-made and nature, MAN-NAHĀTA is the latest project by OXMAN (previously Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab). The project is a top-down master planning braved by bottom-up-design in the place where the grid was once a garden.

Postgram – A bot for ‘human storytelling’

Created by Sebastian Vargas at ECAL (Bachelor Media & Interaction Design), Postgram is a bot for human storytelling that explores issues of public data, privacy and image making using a process of “fair hack” to develop a story narrative. It speculate about the social network behaviour and search for new possibilities for film content.

/+

/++

Cold Call – Time Theft as Avoided Emissions

Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions is an unconventional carbon offsetting scheme that draws on strategies of worker sabotage and applies them in the context of high emission companies in the fossil fuel industry.