i made a tv for websites
hi everyone it’s been awhile
things are a little chaotic here in the U.S., where all of the worst, least qualified people are taking a sledgehammer to everything good we have ever collectively built. welcome to the era of grifters and scammers!
i have been staying sane by focusing all my energies on little projects: tending to my plants (the fiddle leaf is thriving; the calathea vitatta is looking a little crispy), looking at my cat (always), organizing a book club to read Marx (who, it turns out, had opinions on tariffs), watching Star Trek (finished Voyager, finished TNG, now on DS9), and, of course, building little websites.
hypertext television
my latest website is called Hypertext TV.
it's a collection of websites which air on a given day and time each week. the websites you see on a Tuesday at 2pm are different from the ones you'll see on Saturday at 11pm.
as one person online described it: "StumbleUpon, but on a slow drip"
I built the site during Everest Pipkin's class "The Browser is Already a Game Engine" this Spring, which was my second time taking a class at the School for Poetic Computation, which continues to be a source of inspiration and joy.
(if you want to explore some of the things we discussed in class, I helped compile an Are.na channel full of references)
I had a few things in mind when building HTTV, which I wrote about on the site's GitHub:
Most platforms on the web offer on-demand access to practically limitless content. At the same time, platforms algorithmically tailor content to keep us engaged and online. Experiences are individualized—each person has a different feed, and a different sense of time as they navigate that feed.
Television and radio offer an alternative means of programming: a shared schedule, with programs airing at a particular time of day, experienced collectively.
Could we bring this to the web? What if a website went offline at a particular time of day? What if your favorite sites only aired once a week, for a limited time? How would that shape your interaction online? How would that shape your relation with others?
anyways, take a look and see what's airing, and add sites of your own <3
good sites
you can only visit once - does what it says on the tin.
think fourth - “HAVE YOU BECOME UNSTUCK IN TIME?"
ultra high resolution photo - “This is the largest and most detailed photo ever taken of a work of art. It is 717 gigapixels, or 717,000,000,000 pixels, in size.”
listening
n10.as — pronounced "Antennas", I have really been enjoying turning to radio instead of Spotify most days. they have a killer website, to boot. another great station/site is UK-based Slack City and NYC's WFMU
watching
the trees steadily turn from brown to green
reading
too much bad news!!! but also very nice notes in my guestbook. little interactions are keeping me going so thank you for saying nice things
sam cam
