Network Matters

Requests for

Situating TechnologiesKim Kleinert 2024

You reached the back side.
This website is part of an ongoing exploration and was put together for Kim Kleinerts B.F.A. at Klasse Digitale Grafik.

Network Matters asks for the materiality of technology.
Network Matters demands that networks matter.
To network matters calls for a practice of linking, entwining and connecting our active material surroundings.

Today, digital applications are presented as seamless and neutral, as intangible clouds, hovering far above us. This notion is concealing the many levels of abstraction that are inherent to code as well as the very physical places, organisms and infrastructures that facilitate what we perceive as Internet.
Instead of succumbing to the 'Informatics of Domination'(1) I am integrating seamfullness into the many different dimensions of this project. Letting edges, thresholds and transitions surface, the underlying structures leak out into the user interface of the web and the physical exhibition space. (1) In 'A Cyborg Manifesto' (1985) Donna Haraway proposes "informatics of domination" as ways in which information and technology are used to establish and maintain power structures.
'Network Matters: Requests for Situating Technologies' attunes to dynamics of request and response, that are inherent to both digital networks(2) and matter(3) itself. (2) In order to browse the web, open a website or send an email you request data from a server via protocols such as HTTP. The servers response contains files, which your browser interprets, for example, as website.
(3) Within the framework of New Materialism, matter is not understood as passive environment, but active, entangled phenomena that come with an agency of their own. A multiplicity of matter makes their presence known to us, by making calls, to which we are continuously responding.
As part of the project, the website moves along three axes: x-, y- and z. With fetching all its contents from Are.na, this site reveals an open back, allowing multiple directions and points of entry. Each axis distinguishes itself through an individual scroll direction which mirrors its trajectory.
Not only do the axes form a framework to locate points in, but become a core element of the navigation through the user interfaces.

Together all axes form an interconnected system positioning its contents within:
The x-axis contains a questionnaire, which, meandering from location to labor, from possible paths to proximities, aims for a situating of digital technologies.
The y-axis makes space for responses to the questionnaire. This project does not exist in a vacuum, nor did it emerge solely from my own thoughts and being. In the process and the published project I want to allow a polyvocality of voices and perspectives to emerge.
The z-axis is continuously being filled with related items such as graphics, vocabulary, concepts or the documentation of artworks. Forming an ever incomplete inventory each reference can work like a footnote. Through annotation, the glossary exceeds the 'questionnaire' and 'responses' as individual sites and spans a network of its own.
A fourth axis, longed for another medium: vectors was a newsletter I send out while compiling this, prompting a weekly question to readers, friends and other fellow practitioners inboxes.

In closely examining its materialities, I understand the Internet not only as a tool, but space which is tightly intertwined with real places. This enables us to see that, just as we do for the 'real world', we need critical, intersectional practices for the digital realm too. Practices that take care of places, relationships and communities, that enable space for activism and resistance. Practices that reflect on 'power', unveil dominating patterns and refuse to reproduce them.

I would like to thank Christoph Knoth and Konrad Renner for multiple individual talks and coding support.
A heartful thank you also goes to Polina Lobanova, Kristoffer Tjalve, Katharina Nejdl, Morgan Monsour and Fernanda Braun Santos for your collaboration, conversations and curiosity.
Thank you Lucy and everyone else who lend a hand and helped me bring this into an actual space.

Fonts in Use: Remus Variable by Jens Schnitzler and OCR-X by Maxitype.