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This 5 minute edit of a digital ethnographic study by Michael Wesch is an excellent visual introduction to particular techno-social affordances and constraints of the Internet, echoing some ideas from lecture about hypertext and is useful to understanding the broader technical behind-the-scenes through the first decade of internet--- a helpful supplement to thinking about net.art and other forms of production online "The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)" Youtube video, 4:34. Posted by Michael Wesch, March 8, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

This is an excellent resource for researching a variety of primary source documents. Digitized films, rare books, zines, audio recordings from many diverse historical and contemporary sources. Of particular use to New Media Studies are the copious amounts of documents from the so-called "digital revolution" of the 1990s. This includes television programs like "Computer Chroncicles" (1983-2002) chock full of artists and technologists and the ideas that inspired them. The artifacts in this series including the various motion graphics, fashion and even jargon that permeated the computer cultures at this time! There are also fairly recent additions, including the cyberpunk zines "Reality Hackers" and "High Frontiers." These present a 'street-level' pulse on the countercultural charge of new media in the 80s and 90s. Finally, I want to point out a free service offered here that is called the Wayback Machine --- a searchable history of the Internet, billions of websites archived continuously since the Internet went commercial in the mid 1990s! The Internet Archive. "The Wayback Machine" https://archive.org/web/. (Accessed January 24, 2014)

I used the way-back machine to find this web page about the MIT Rad Lab. The Radiation Laboratory is talked about in the Shifting Politics of Computational Metaphor reading, but this web page gives a more detailed look into Rad Lab. This webpage was published in the Spring of 1991 which means in was published on the fiftieth anniversary of Rab Lab. The web page talks about RLE's experiments with micro-waves and the legacy that it left behind. "The wartime experience in the RadLab showed that talented people from several disciplines could effectively focus on a variety of fundamental and applied research projects with outstanding results. Many of these investigators acquired new skills in order to solve these problems, and their achievements showed how effective interdisciplinary research can be." "The MIT Radiation Laboratory - RLE's Microwave Heritage", RLE Currents, v.2 no. 4, Spring 1991 in 18.4MB PDFInternet Archive copy

Also check out the Rad Lab Series of writings. After the end of World War II, the United States government continued to pay key people who had worked at the Radiation Laboratory for six months to enable them to write about their work. http://www.jlab.org/ir/MITSeries.html

As I read 'Web Work: A History of Internet Art' by Rachel Greene, I highlighted some of the websites mentioned to go back to and explore. One of these sites was jodi.org. On my first visit to the site, I just typed in Jodi.org in my Chrome browser, which I will warn you right now: DON'T DO IT! I was brought to a blank black page with no information except that my pop up blocker informed me that it blocked a pop up. Being the fool that I am, I changed the setting to allow pop ups from jodi.org, thinking that maybe the pop up was part of the net.art I would find on the page. Immediately a half dozen or so pop ups popped up and started moving around the page, as I tried to close out of the windows they became more and more erratic and finally I just quit Chrome to get out of there. Then I went to Jodi.org throughout the portal of the Wayback Machine. It seemed like another one of those: "rabbit-hole-look-there-are-so-many-fucking-links-all-over-that-move-and-change-colors-and-shit-aren't-we-so-disruptive-type-sites." that Clae was talking about. Then as I was writing this up, in order to give a better description of the site I went to outside of The Wayback Machine, I went back to Jodi.org and a different page came up! Each time I closed the window and went back to Jodi.org, I was directed to a new and different page. It still seems sketchy and I only visited a few more pages, but I thought it was interesting anyways. "Jodi.org." Accessed February 20, 2014. http://jodi.org.

Aha! JODI, of course! This happened to me too---I couldn't remember which net.artist it was. It's certainly one way of engaging a viewer. This reminds me of something that the writer William Burroughs once said in an interview "If I really knew how to write, I could write something that someone would read and it would kill them" ---- JODI's site doesn't seem so fatal in intention, but there is a strong sense of panic induced by their clever coding!

Like the old websites accessed through the Wayback machine, this is another great archival resource for research. Primary source documents offer direct reflection of the language and design from a specific point in time, without the inherent filtering of such content through secondary sources. Specifically, like Radical Software, Whole Earth Catalog was a critical tool within the networked countercultures of the 1960s / 70s. Here, you can skim through digitized collection of Whole Earth Catalogs, subsequent "CoEvolution Quarterly" , "Whole Earth Software Catalog" and other pursuits. Identify recurrent patterns along with curious or lesser known topics of these cybernetically inclined thinkers. The site itself is a remediation of the magazine as "evaluation and access device," using popular categories of the original for navigation. "Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas" Accessed February 2, 2014. http://www.wholeearth.com

Here's part 1 (of 3 segments on youtube) of documentary by John Akomfrah on Afrofuturism---an African-American literary and cultural movement, associated with science-fiction writers Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler and others. This movie's protagonist the "data thief" digs through archives of past, present and future, drawing on intersections between various musical genres which share a mythos of future technology and the extra-terrestrial. The future read as history, something already happened, the Atlantic Slave trade framed as alien abduction narrative, the music producer/DJ as cyborg --- human/machine hybrid finding new connections through material memories of black culture. "The Last Angel of History (part 1)" Posted on Youtube by Desultory Heroics. November 23, 2013. Accessed February 21, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqgkXbQOi68

Through the Rhizome website, I found Net.artist, Cornelia Sollfrank. Sollfrank with the help of four other artists, created a program that would comb the internet for content and then assemble it into a sort of collage of text and images. This is the Net.art Generator. It seems to me that the project is a comment on the proliferation of net.art at the time and whether or not certain net.art could even be considered art. The piece also seems to question authorship and appropriation. There is also a link on the site to a video of the generator in an art show somewhere, being used. "A smart artist makes the machine do the work" Sollfrank, Cornelia. Rhizome.org, "The Net.art Generator." Last modified 2011. Accessed February 21, 2014. http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/33601/. Hasty, Nick. Rhizome, "Rhizome." Last modified 01 17, 2011. Accessed February 21, 2014. http://rhizome.org/.

An interesting case of design fiction where they have actually programmed a washer to be connected to a smartphone through the cloud so that you may control changes from you phone as well as receive notifications. What they have done which I find interesting is that they have made this video as a way to "start a conversation" about this instance of design fiction. Unlike some design fiction they are not claiming to know what the future will look like or pretend like they have already created the product and worked out all of the bugs. Their approach to design fiction is very simplistic and honest. ""Cloudwash is a prototype connected washing machine. We prototype products at Berg to help us understand how our platform should work, and to encourage better design in connected things…" BERG, "Berg Case Studies/ Cloudwash." Accessed March 20, 2014. http://bergcloud.com/case-studies/cloudwash/.

This piece of Design Fiction is imagined to exist in a world where products are developed to the point where they almost have lives themselves. When thinking in terms of Spime, "Brad the Toaster" is a product that plays into the idea of discontinuing the process where products of today's consumer culture are built, and then soon become obsolete due to new technologies arising. Brad and his fellow Sprimes might be the answer to all environmental sustainability problems. Sprimes would be sent out into the world, their every move being trached. Every interaction that they have with people will be tracked, and stored in a database, ready to be accessed by developers. If these developers can study these interactions, what does work with a product, and what doesn't, then their Brad 2.0's can be the best possible product, without having to create a series of upgraded products, only to be obsolete when a new need is discovered. Vanhemert, Kyle. "A Toaster That Begs You to Use It: Welcome to the Bizarro Smart Home." Wired. March 14, 2014 http://www.wired.com/design/2014/03/addicted-products/

Thanks, this intersects with a number of rich topics within realm of New Media and, as you note, spimes in particular! There's also a funny variant here of anthropomorphized machines and notions of sentience. The video for Brad the Toaster is another compelling example of a diegetic prototype