English

Soft Computers

Soft Computers: Crochet Patters for Apple IIe and Macintosh Classic II. By Sarah Rooney, Media Archaeology Lab . ( Original announcement at MAL of this project. ) From the introduction: In her early 2000’s piece “A Vernacular Web”, net artist and theorist Olia Lialina uses the words “bright, rich, personal, slow, and under construction” to describe the Internet of the 1990’s. If you’re picking up this publication of crochet patterns, you might already know crochet in a similar way to Lialina’s words; it is slow, ever-evolving, and has years of personal and collective history layered into every hand-crafted pattern. What happens, then, when a personal computer is made out of crochet? How does the material translation from plastic to yarn change how a user interacts with an object? Lialina’s description of the bright, rich, and personal web indicates a powerful ethos of amateur curiosity and experimental outlook that she argues were embedded into the aesthetic choices of early Internet users; this was the Internet of Geocities and starry night sky backgrounds, after all. As technology progressed into the late 2010’s, the Internet left this sentiment of a vibrant, user-pioneered digit

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