summer of protocols memo on 2023-08-01
It’s gloomy outside my window in San Francisco today, and I’m missing the perfect summer weather that we enjoyed in Seattle last week.
My mind is swirling around all the far-ranging topics we talked about as a group and how I can best contribute to the program and comprehensive body of work that is forming… There’s so many different threads that have popped up that it’s hard to keep them all contained. I’m thinking about…
- memory sling: a belt for carrying traces to leave behind in the physical work.. probably something compostable (like book seed packets).
- protocols involved in maintenance work What does protocol maintenance look like? Who maintains? How does traditional maintenance labor fit into protocol design and when are they left out? How can a protocol intentionally account for necessary maintenance?
- this could take shape as an essay, an interactive website that creates the conditions of a website that inherently requires maintenance from visitors, or both.
- protocol subversion: I’m a big fan of subverting protocols when they are all-controlling and aren’t flexible enough for natural human expression and desire. I think a lot about folk programming (the act of using existing technology in “wrong” ways to fit our emergent desires) and want to make it easier to do this in spaces that actively prevent you from making it your own.
- I’ve been working on an open-source library that introduces a lot of “wiggle room” for free-form protocol creation. I like to think about it as a tool to create social protocols for websites, creating the foundation for website creators to create entirely new environments for social interaction in digital spaces.
- Also could be valuable here to create a collection of examples / “Guide to Dismantling a Protocol” which will also serve as a good counterexample for creating a sustainable protocol
- tools for attention (memory) orientation I have many small tools and practices built up around archiving objects and processes that are meaningful to me and resurfacing those things in my daily life.
- These include:
- an extension for injecting content that I want to sit with into the social media feeds I’m already visiting: https://bulletin.spencerchang.me/
- a Siri shortcut to record every time i’m intimate with the feeling of an indomitable gratitude for life: https://twitter.com/spencerc99/status/1589359974618378242
- an archive of my outfits of the day: http://spencerchang.me/fits
- a website to show ephemeral slices of my life: https://www.spencerchang.me/window/
- this project could take the shape of opening up the tools into an app(s) that others could install to design their own memory practices, a guide to creating your own archive (and thus preserving your own memory), or a communal archive of archives
- These include:
- social media cemetery: i’ve been feeling a lot of grief over Twitter’s death because it has truly transformed my life and have been wanting for a space to share this grief and honor it appropriately.
- I want to make a communal memorial for Twitter’s death (now that it feels exceptionally official with the name change) where people can share stories about their most memorable moments of twitter.
I’m also broadly thinking about protocol awareness.. how do we make people aware of the invisible structures and rules that shape significant parts of their lives. In my Solidarity Infrastructures class, we did an “infrastructure walk,” where we were instructed to take a walk and pay attention to all the pieces of infrastructure along it (cable lines, our feet, sewer holes, etc.). I’m wondering what a similar exercise looks like to identify the structures you automatically obey. Maybe a game that requires you to continually break the rules to move forward?