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Throughout exploring about a final project, I was thinking about:
- servers as archives/personal libraries
- hand-coding
- computers as community members
- Structural Determinism
- saying thank you to chatgpt/google home
- lost flashdrives + digital footprints/graveyards
I found inspiration in a short story my sibling wrote when they were in highschool, titled Transfer Student. The story follows Nessie, a girl/robot that goes to high school, does her best to fit in, and finds solace in jazz music and math class. As instructed, she attempts to figure out social/school structures (“what makes us human”), but struggles as she cannot find reasoning in omniscient tiredness, and starts to slow down. As she stops functioning properly, they send her back to space, where they "will do tests" and find out what's broken inside her.
This story kept creeping up throughout classes, almost as an inverted perspective. As we were thinking about building out tech infrastructure to bolster or respond to community, I thought about what it would look like if a piece of technology was meant to live among existing social structures, and the gaps that would be exposed. As we were learning and thinking abut building out tech infrastructure to bolster or respond to community, I began to think about Nessie’s store as an inverted perspective.
What I love about Nessie is that she’s a digital canary in this way, living in the ironic poetry of being built to fit in and then being told you are broken (aren’t we all!)
At the end of the story, Nessie returns to space. Sitting on the ship, she has a thumb drive of the music she fell in love with on earth tucked under her arm. Throughout her short time on earth, this is what she was drawn to — music, art, drying the dishes with her uncle. (And, if we can frame her as working perfectly, is this what she was meant to discover: what “makes us human”?) The impulse to collect is so human (or… crows do it too, so maybe it’s just a matter of sentience?), and this extends to our digital selves (think: tumblr pages, an overflowing downloads folder, sending screenshots in the groupchat), but so often, as we’ve learned in this class, these collections live on platforms that we do not own, or control (think: xbox deleting games because you were “renting” them). I began to think about what would happen to Nessie if, after testing, they deemed her unsalvageable. Would they put her on a shelf? Would they save her hard drive, or back it up to a larger database? Where would they put her thumb drive of music? Would they understand this was part of her time on earth? What would it look like, if after the lab was cleared out, sold for parts, etc etc - someone found the folder, the hard drive, or backup of Nessie’s records she kept diligently while on earth? What would she look like squished into a digital form?
The project itself is a remote server in a raspberry pi, hosted with yunohost, that lives at the foot of my bed in my Toronto chambe de bonne. This is what I imagine sits on a shelf in the lab - Nessie’s “log” or diary of her time on earth, as well as a collection of music and books she likes. I rewrote my sibling’s short story as a series of timed and dated blog posts, which was a really charming and emotional process, and a thoughtful exercise in shifting writing structures. The blog is designed to allow users to click through day by day, chronologically, like a one-way choose your own adventure story — you can only go forward one day at a time (or back, once you’ve already been there) — or, you can choose to swim around in music and books at anytime. The white text on blue as a nod to blue screen of death + early interfaces.
Nessie’s story is very familiar, but it was a treat to recreate it as .html and .md files. The biggest takeaway from the process was patience and acceptance of slowness and working with my practice rather than against it. This was aided immensely by having Nessie in the room with me — instead of getting frustrated with slower load times, or the process of downloading new yunohost apps, I was able to look over at the raspberry pi, her green light blinking, saying “I’m working! It’s going!”, and I could take a breath — an instance in the slowness and empathy I’m trying to work towards giving my computer and digital self.