Mark Rigley @markrigley
The Vinyl Server - an idea of how to build a web server that wears out
- Web server that serves up a digital image in response to HTTP request
- Instead of digital storage medium it uses an analog storage medium
- Uses a custom vinyl record on automatic turntable hooked up to raspberry pi
- Vinyl record will wear out over time, causing errors
- Intention was to the place a digital object in an analog frame
- Make digital content subject to entropy and decay
Inspired by a question: Can you build a website that wears out as it is used?
- Challenged consider the lifecycle of a product and take control of forces that cause wear and tear
- Imagining what it could look like in the future
- Architecture: design buildings and monuments that will leave behind aesthetically interesting ruins
- Compelled to think more broadly about ethical consequences of products (e.g., global warming and pollution)
How would you build a website that wears out as it is used?
- Computer systems are designed to be error-resistant and hide the physical elements that run it
- Before digital media, we had to use analog media to store data
- Analog media are necessarily embodied as physical objects, can deteriorate
- Examples:
- Vinyl records and film photos sound degrade over time
- Digital objects don’t exist in a particular place - they are everywhere and nowhere all at once, outside of space and time
Metaphysical shift
- Digital media are like Plato’s forms
- Plato: the world we experience through senses is a reflection of a higher realm (realm of the forms)
- e.g., triangles in the real world are never truly perfect but there are laws and ideals about perfect triangles
- Metaphysical framework to understand the changes new media introduces to society
- Consequences of new media are also not limited by time and space
- E.g., invention of writing enabled ideas to become laws, which governed geographically distributed empires