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

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

"When I was learning how to write in grade school, I noticed that all my teachers wrote with near-identical handwriting on the chalkboard...I realized that we were being taught to write in a specific font." The statement here is from series by contemporary artist Jesse England. This is not net.art, but an interesting variant on "remediation," or a perverse post-digital gesture pointing to non-obvious connections between new and old modes of communication design. England, Jesse. "Learn to write in Different Fonts: Jesse England" Accessed February 14, 2014. http://jesseengland.net/index.php?/project/learn-to-write-in-different-fonts/

Described by new media artist Alexander Galloway as " simultaneously an introduction to and a retrospective of net art" this turn of the millenium collection of net.art was put together by ZKM, a German art, technology and culture institute dedicated to interdisciplinary and international collaborations.

Rhizome, one of the early media art organizations, continues to serve contemporary new media art communities and, importantly, to conserve and archive Internet based artworks. In this collection you'll find a variety of net.art and hypertext fiction projects from the first decade.

Here's a more extensive collection on Rhizome: http://rhizome.org/artbase/browse/archived/

Net.art works by Russian artist Alexei Shulgin. Shulgin was quite active in the early years of Internet based art and culture, here, his website chock full of these early works which use and abuse the affordances of the medium at that time.

Russian net artist, Olia Lialina, one of the trailblazers in this new medium,approached from background in film and theory. Her website, linked above, was also the first network based art gallery, causing much feedback (positive and negative) from offline / online artists. You'll find Lialina's net.art works from the 1990s below her bio and cv information.

Internet -based art in an online venue, housed on the servers of the 'brick-and-mortar' art institution, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Then curator Steve Dietz initiating this collection which remains accessible, an incredible archive of early net.art works.

Net.art collection intiated in 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Amongst the many artists works you'll find examples of net.art conservation, and questions as to the 'integrity' of the work that accompany such endeavors --- is the artwork compromised if you update the browser plug-ins?

Another noteworthy supporter of Internet based artworks is Turbulence. Here, in the archives, dated chronologically by year (96 - 04 for this assignment) an array of artists works commissioned by this wing of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc, a project that started in 1981 to support artists' experiments with earlier forms of networked media.

This animated video by designer Melih Bilgil provides a concise, relatively easy to understand motion graphic animation about the Internet's infrastructure. Key technological inventions are detailed with a series of highly legible icons that Bilgil developed while studying Communication Design. Faced with inherently technical and sometimes challenging descriptions of various networking protocols and systems, this narrated visualization is an effective supplement to the histories relayed in the Cybernetic Counterculture texts. Melih Bilgil. "History of the Internet" Vimeo posted 2009. https://vimeo.com/2696386 Accessed February 11, 2014

Documentation of one of several "satellite art" projects that emerged in the late 1970s and early 80s. Artists taking advantage of residency opportunities with NASA to access various telecommunications networks! Here a project of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, a platform for this duo's query "what can people separated by distance do together through technology?" --- this 'sculpture' is fascinating to me in the ways that it illustrates the allure of contact, the social practice of technology. Of course the novelty-spectacle of an activity that is now commonplace is also humorous! "Excerpts from a Hole-in-Space - the mother of all video chats" posted by Larry Press March 15, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMVtE1QjaU Accessed February 7, 2014

This is an advertisement for the SAGE computer system, one of key military-academic-industrial research endeavors discussed in the Fred Turner reading. The advertisement provides a good audio-visual elaboration of the inter-dependent aspects of a cybernetic system. There are also various technological artifacts present, including light guns and reactive screens. "IBM SAGE Computer AD, 1960" Posted by chiklit Dec. 29, 2009. Accessed February 6, 2014

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

This is cool to hear about your own memories of Epitaph's original gestures online, it seems as an amplification of anarchic/punk politics through the newly available networks. The more recent versions of the site echo the observations of writer M.Garite that "punk rock wears out faster than a leather jacket" ----- For future posts here, please use rather the "bookmark" function (this is a topic) --- that will allow you to post a live link and also leave comments below.

Here's info about this year's Wikipedia Art+Feminism edit-a-thon. Turns out that despite being the "encyclopedia edited by everyone" a shockingly low number of women have participated as editors on Wikipedia. Thinking about the gender bias evident in the 1980s Hackers documentary suggests a possible trend echoed online today. At any rate, this is tomorrow, Saturday 9-3 at PSU check it out!

I started my media archeological dig in hopes of finding out when the icons of social media sites (tumblr, facebook, etc) started appearing on websites of official news sites. I chose Salon.com somewhat arbitrarily. Surprisingly, I discovered that salon.com was not always the property of today's news and entertainment magazine. As it turned out, the URL originally belonged to "Salon dot Com a Cyber Community," a hub of salon and beauty professionals, and was established as such in 1997. The oldness of this site is prominently paraded in the design --- brightly and variously colored text against a black background, words underlined to denote hyperlinks, lines of text centered to (presumably) maintain order-- while avoiding the headache of working with framesets and tables in web design of this era. No images. There is a broken link up top, a 'counter', based on surrounding information. The use of the term "cyber" to characterize this community is another bit of faded jargon linking the site to the 1990s. During that decade, the 'cyber' prefix was affixed to many people, places and things to signal 'new media' status. Some versions of this site also link to an "E-Zine," another trope of remediation, aimed at association with 'e-mail', most likely. It seems that some point in early 1999, salon.com shifted to the Salon Media Group, and the early versions of the web magazine that persists to this day appeared (tables and css in effect!)

Marshall Mcluhan's assertion that "we shape our tools and then our tools shape us" mentioned in class, echoed again in the Nicolas Carr reading this week. Here's a handy web version of Mcluhan's influential text from 1964. Mcluhan's quips, probes and puns were quite popular in the 1960s, resonant then with a youth culture immersed in 'new media' and the social-political intersections thereof. In the 1990s, as the so-called 'digital revolution' ramped up, Mcluhanisms were prominently re-surfaced. There are not chapter titles provided in this rendition of the book, so you might want to cross-reverence a table of contents elsewhere. On the other hand, you can use the 'find' function of your browser to seek out sections on a variety of media from the spoken word to the printing press, money, roads, clothing, comics, telephones, television and much more! First part is theory, second part case studies. "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Marshall Mcluhan (1964)" Accessed January 30, 2014. http://www.lab404.com/242/understanding_media.html

Here's a clip from the World's Fair of the late 1930s, demonstrating the "voder." This speech synthesizer is one of the inventions referenced in Vannevar Bush's essay this week. He was envisioning ways that it could be combined with other contemporaneous devices to make a sort of auto-stenography possible. The name is peculiar, a variation on the more familiar 'vocoder'. Operationally, it consisted of an elaborate mix of buzzing and hissing blasts of air and electrical vibrations, producing vocal formations by way of pedals and keys! It's voices are familiar, even iconic, but mostly by way of electronic pop music from the 1970s and 80s,bands like Kraftwerk amplifying the connotations of the robotic, and generally, the future. "VODER (1939) Early Speech Synthesizer. Youtube Video. 00:44. Posted by VintageCG on April 4, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0

This is a project that could be categorized as design fiction. The artist/architect Mark Shepard explores the possible ways in which the proliferation of 'sentient cities', urban environments equipped with many, many networked sensing devices, might jeopardize privacy and increase unsolicited data collection. He does this using the affordances of fiction, designing and building functional prototypes for an imagined 'near-future' context. This sort of 'critical making' is a strong supplement to traditional modes of scholarship which Shepard also pursues. Mark Shepard "Sentient City Survival Kit" 2010 http://www.survival.sentientcity.net/info.html Accessed January 25, 2014