3D DOM viewer, copy-paste this into your console to visualise the DOM topographically.

The repression that environmental activists who use peaceful civil disobedience are currently facing in Europe is a major threat to democracy and human rights. The environmental emergency that we are collectively facing, and that scientists have been documenting for decades, cannot be addressed if those raising the alarm and demanding action are criminalized for it. The only legitimate response to peaceful environmental activism and civil disobedience at this point is that the authorities, the media, and the public realize how essential it is for us all to listen to what environmental defenders have to say.

Envisioning a Neuromancer game developed for the revolutionary new Commodore Amiga by his own company Futique, the fabulously well-connected Leary assembled a typically star-studded cast of characters to help him make it. It included David Byrne, lead singer of the rock band Talking Heads; Keith Haring, a trendy up-and-coming visual artist; Helmut Newton, a world-famous fashion photographer; Devo, the New Wave rock group; and none other than William Gibson’s personal literary hero William S. Burroughs to adapt the work to the computer.

I recently posted the table of contents and a chronological list of network entries that will appear in Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. As I try to make clear in the introduction, most entries also include examples of experiments with or on these networks because we often don’t know just how compelling a given network can be until we see artists exploring its limits and possibilities. Not surprisingly, however, just as we rarely understand how networks actually work, from the moment we send to the moment we receive, we also rarely attend to the underlying workings of media art. Stories abound of how, for example, artists from the 1970s and 1980s plugged this into that which resulted in certain fascinating outputs; but details are often frustratingly lacking or altogether absent on how the connections took place, even when the ‘how’ is exactly the point. To that end, I have also tried to include network diagrams and technical details for these experiments wherever possible.

document and experiment with networks outside of what’s now called “the internet.” We are invested in digging up alternative and forgotten networks so that we can reimagine the future of the internet as the future of networks.

plugdata is a free/open-source visual programming environment based on pure-data. It is available for a wide range of operating systems, and can be used both as a standalone app, or as a VST3, LV2, CLAP or AU plugin.

diagram.website: an incomplete map to regions of the handmade, personal, indie internet

Having created time-based, moving graphics jewels since 1975, utilizing LCD technology, I set as my next goal to create truly cybernetic jewelry. This meant a significant portion of the esthetic entity comprising the jewel would reside in a software program, executing in real time on a microcumputer residing in the jewel and contolling an output device—in this case an LCD panel with custom graphics. The patterns in this LCD would move and change under software control. Importantly, this meant that competely different looks could be obtained without changing the hardware in any way, something never before possible. Additionally the software could make decisions about how to control its output, based on internal and external monitoring of its environment, adding a component of "intelligence" not to be found without using computers. For the first time ever, jewelry objects could be endowed with simple, but real, aspects of awareness and volition- the first seeds of AI jewlery.

Veejay is a visual instrument

Veejay is a visual instrument and realtime video sampler.

With veejay, you can play the video like you would play a piano.

While playing, you can record the resulting video directly to disk (video sampling), all effects are realtime and optimized for use on modern processors, Veejay likes the sound of your video's as much as their images: sound is kept in sync ( pitched when needed - trickplay) and delivered to JACK for possible further processing.

You can cluster to allow a number of machines to work together over the network (uncompressed streaming, veejay chaining) And much more...

The engine is historically based upon mjpegtools's lavplay and processes all video in YUV planar It performs at its best, currently with MJPEG AVI (through ffmpeg) or one of veejay's internal formats. Veejay is built upon a servent architecture.

Shawl is a wrapper for running arbitrary programs as Windows services, written in Rust. It handles the Windows service API for you so that your program only needs to respond to ctrl-C/SIGINT. If you're creating a project that needs to run as a service, simply bundle Shawl with your project, set it as the entry point, and pass the command to run via CLI.

Heavenchord - To The Antares

Lee’s witnessing of the underground switchboard prompted an idea: and for that he needed access to a computer network. Later he took a position as an engineer at Resource One, a radical idea for a people’s computer center at Project One, a DIY commune of artists, technologists, musicians, psychologists, alternative schools, darkroom and community radio. There, Lee worked on a team to build Community Memory, the first public community bulletin board, predating the web and social media by decades.

in a moment of utter insanity, i realized that the creators of Portal did something very special for the Macintosh Plus: they made the game a f'ing BOOTER. it was never meant to be run from within the OS. you just inserted the diskette, turned on your Plus. the entire game is an operating system of its own, executing instructions from the CPU and ROM. this isn't anything new for C64 or Apple // users, but for the Macintosh it was practically unheard of. they replicated the Macintosh System 2 gui perfectly, just for the game.

the Macintosh port is still gorgeous today: a mouse-driven point'n'click UI with high-res 1-bit icons, and high-res text. it feels good in a way that none of the other versions (C64, DOS, Amiga) do.

but what stands out to me, nearly 40 years after its release, is that this is a hypertext game through and through. the story unfolds as you click around, wandering from computer network to computer network, reading documents and piecing together how the Earth became abandoned hundreds of year ago.

as far as I know, Portal's creators (Rob Swigart and Brad Fregger) were never credited for producing a very early Hypertext game. Portal predates Hypercard by an entire year.

recorded some gameplay in mini vMac for posterity. as far as I know, this is the only footage of Portal for the Macintosh that has ever existed on the web.

he internet used to be ✨fun✨

I’ve been meaning to write some kind of Important Thinkpiece™ on the glory days of the early internet, but every time I sit down to do it, I find another, better piece that someone else has already written. So for now, here’s a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question “Why have a personal website?” with “Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.”

If you’ve written something that feels like it belongs here—especially if your voice is one that’s frequently underrepresented—I’d be interested to read it! Holler at me via email (kwon at fastmail.com), or on Mastodon (mastodon.social/@rjkwon).