Resurrecting Networks

​Join Internet Archive Europe and Sevgi Tan for a reflective workshop that explores death in digital infrastructures, devices and media. Using media archaeology and collective practice, we examine obsolescence, remember lost technologies, and imagine futures shaped by what we choose to preserve.

​About the workshop:

​Resurrection is a series of workshops where participants explore death in digital infrastructures, devices, technologies or understandings. We use the deprecation of these dead as a point to remember and respect their origins, lives and deaths.

​What:

​Together we will discuss dead networks and why do we think they have passed on. What were the reasons of their abandon and what do we miss about them? We will write and perform eulogies for our chosen kin, remembering and honoring them.

​With slowing down the passing we create rituals of slow understandings and moments of research to defy contemporary consumerist habits that are imposed upon us.

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​The idea for resurrection comes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a method of maintenance and care based in media archeology. These dead bordering the living share a collective past and common destiny in the veil, and hence also a simultaneity in time. As we remember the past, we connect futures of networks and see what are the differences, genealogies that we would like to keep, what did we keep, what can come after? Taking space and time with them, dead tech could help us become more aware of the contemporary history of deprecation and cultural/digital waste and inspire us to dig deeper with every peck of the keyboard.

​Dead networks could include: telephony, telegraphy, speed dating, party lines, AOL, MSN messenger, askfm, tumblr, block parties etc.

​Format & what to expect:

​We will start with a small introduction of the concept and dive into a group discussion about how do we perceive death in networks. We will make a list of dead (graveyard) and choose our kin. We will construct small eulogies for them and present to each other. The performance could be reading a poem, a moment of silence, a song, a short paragraph, or a visual representation of your feelings, anything you see that suits your eulogy.

​Practical details:

​DRESS CODE IS FUNERAL ATTIRE. Please be respectful and dress accordingly

​This workshop is open to anyone who has an interest in researching origins of their networks past and present, artists, archivists, tech lovers and tech haters, anyone interested in death and life of non-alive beings and care and maintenance workers of all kinds.

​What to bring:

​Please bring a friendly attitude and be open to perform in front of a small group of peers and new friends.

​If you have a physical example of a dead network, please bring them with you. It would be really interesting to look at objects of network together :)