Codename PPC
Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly — Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
Good morning.
In two weeks I plan to launch a small personal project codenamed PPC. The project is related to sending and receiving letters. The idea is sketched out. The domain name is purchased. In fact, PPC is already online, but you’ll have to wait two more weeks while I polish the sketch before I feel ready to share it.
In other news, Uno started doing the downward-facing dog. I don’t think he is practicing yoga, rather he seems eager to stand up by himself. He is trying again and again. Every time with full determination. I’m learning at least as much as he is.
With care,
Kristoffer
VISUALLY PLEASING
READER INTERVIEW
Tina Sosna captures the world in a way that seems more like a dreamscape than a landscape. Together with her cat and boyfriend, she lives the countryside life that city-scapers fantasize about and documents it in compelling video diaries. She has a garden of produce that she turns into dishes and her own stationery collection.
K: How do you archive your thoughts?
Tina: I often find myself writing letters to people in my head. When I’m showering, when I walk to the train station, when I ride my bike or when I take my bread out of the oven. I carefully choose the words of things I want to remember and sometimes they have an addressee. But sometimes they are just meant to stay in my head for a little while before they drift away.
K: How would you describe your work to my grandparents?
Tina: If your grandma is like mine she would call right before bedtime and ask about how you can always know about the changing weather. And if you tell her you look it up on the internet she starts to laugh so much and say that that’s so funny, because she doesn’t even know what that is, the internet. So I think it would come down to: I take pictures of others and everything else that is dear to me and I draw tiny things that might be not very special to others, but to me they mean the world.
K: Where do you escape to when your internet is crashing?
Tina: To my teenage years. To the music I have been listening to then. There is a folder on my computer with all this music. I never know if I break out into tears or laughter or if I will dance the time away.
K: What is the deepest ocean you went diving in?
Tina: I have been diving in very deep oceans and sometimes it has been incredibly hard to find back to the surface. There has been a long Winter when I lived on my own after years of sharing a home, in a city I didn’t know anybody or anything, when I didn’t know how to go on. I missed everything so incredibly much and just wanted to go back in time.
K: How would you start a letter to a frog?
Tina: Dear Friend,
Do you remember when I was five and I looked after your babies? I was afraid they would not be able to cross our pond because they were so teeny tiny and so I started to collect the halves of walnut shells from my dad’s garden and let your little ones swim in them. And then I dreamed about going on a walnut shell boat ride myself. :)
ROADSIDE FLOWERS
Make your own digital birthday cake.
INTERNET STORIES
Emily Segal Can See the Future
I’m always taken away by the richness of contemporary culture in Emily Segal’s words. Her reference catalogue is overwhelming and without the mundane observations and cliches common in most trend forecasting. Whether you know Emily or not, I am sure you’ll be fascinated by the images she paints in this interview.
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
If you have been tired of social media within the past one-three years there is a good chance you have come across the concept of digital gardens. The name itself promises a cozy place to rest and nurture, opposed to the endless stream of social media banter. But despite the recent surge, the concept of digital gardening goes back to the 90s. Maggie Appleton tells the story perfectly.
Today we are all stylists aiming to please the algorithm for our post to reach as many people as possible. But this article is not about us. It is about fashion stylists and how their work is being formed by the small screens of our phones. The current trend among fashion stylists is cringecore: “memetic, near-satirical styling that simultaneously repels and draws in viewers.”
INTERNETMEZZO
Solar Protocol. (This is incredible!)
“Solar Protocol is a web platform hosted across a network of small solar-powered servers set up in different locations around the world. A solar-powered server is a computer that is powered by a solar panel and a small battery. Each server can only offer intermittent connectivity that is dependent on available sunshine, the length of day and local weather conditions. With servers located in different time zones, seasons and weather systems, internet traffic is directed to wherever the sun is shining.
When making a Google search, your request would be sent to whichever Google server responds the quickest which is usually the server that is the closest geographically. This prioritizes speed over all other factors that determine how a network operates, a characteristic that is prevalent in much digital culture. But it doesn’t have to work this way. Instead, the Solar Protocol network is built with a different logic based on the sun, automatically directing traffic to whichever server is generating the most solar energy at the time of the request.”
GUESTBOOK
I made a digital guestbook for you to leave messages for me and the other readers. I would be very happy if the guestbook could become a medium to share words between all of us. Going forward, I aim to include one message from the guestbook in the newsletter every week.
“Take a deep breath in. Hold it. Breathe out. Smile. You are beautiful.” — Emily on March 12, 2021
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly — Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
Last week this letter was sent to 748 people. Thirtyfour are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write. Logo by Studio Hollywood. Print by Luka. Photograph by Ana Santl.