Final semester project: interfacing with an API + create physical interface

Area of Interest: Single purpose devices, Interactive Furniture, Wearable Physical Archives.

I’m interested in checking provenance of media. I will be working with the Internet Archive API.

More research needs to be done, but each piece of media transferred in via WiFi (through thesis devices) will be subject to a reverse image search or Wayback Machine lookup. This is an unplanned extension of my thesis d2d (device2device?) sharing, hopefully for a show where folks can donate content to a common (physical) space, that so far has only existed in the other dimension (the internet).

If content can’t be found, it gets added. How are duplicates seen in this belief system?

The goal is to outline the life of an internet artifact → eg. first published in X; seen around the internet X times. Eventually, I’d love to create an endangerment score, mixing Google Trends data with Wayback Machine + reverse image search.

If i’m serious about this, the real findings come from analysing what do endangered internet artifacts have in common. Communities, distribution - what does each tree look like.

Connecting unknown, unlinked (edit for logic consistency) source material that arrives through the private network back to a common (family?) tree (OSS ref).

Links back to how we get news today - shaped by algorithms and social websites, that make it harder to back link anything for their own profit. The loss of the link means loss of provenance. This links back to the right to access information. Information, in order to be worthy of that name, needs to be informative - that includes checks, sources and access to the life of this media artifact.

This way, we’re making physical presence a requirement for sharing files, donating them to a common bank and contextualizing them right after to common ground.

>>>>>> Tree analogy

Until finding this API and reading docs, it had not occurred to me that there’s an obvious field of research here within internet media artifacts where so many fun links can be drawn to other social science findings and I don’t think I’ve seen other researchers define it in this way… hm!

Edit: I’m wrong:

The Bit List 2024: Global List of Endangered Digital Species - Interim Review | Policy Commons

Physicality

There’s a home version and an archive station version of this. I’m inclined to do whatever Archive Station version of this is possible within the timeline.

Home: Media collected during the day gets offloaded at night to a sanctuary of sorts / evening routine-esque. With a little connector and magnets (tbd?). Each node or pod returns to a piece of furniture with a screen or light indicator. Data caretaker reunites data with provenance. Connects source material to source. Personal or family device.
Archive Station (Cyber Deck adjacent?)

Square Monitor + Pink Monochrome Display (which has a radio antenna → for future projects!)
Can jailbreak wireless Playstation controller to control this station.

#TODO follow threads further
www.google.com 🔎 jailbreak wireless controllers ps as a web server - Google Search
#TODO Test power: I got 2 PS controllers for 4$ today, that I need to do a quick power test on.

Internet Archive API

Coincidentally, after choosing API and mapping out device flow, just saw this Wired article from 2 hours ago on many journalism entities blocking the wayback machine despite relying on it for research: