The Internet of Dead Things
Edited by Benjamin Gaulon
The Internet of Dead Things is a collective book that takes as its starting point the MinitelSE project by Jérôme Saint-Clair, ex-artist, and Benjamin Gaulon, French artist, professor and cultural producer. MinitelSE is an Open Source operating system running on dedicated hardware designed for the Minitel of the 1980s.
With their Internet of Dead Things Institute, this artistic, critical and satirical startup explores the potential for reuse of computer hardware considered obsolete, and in particular the Minitel.
After an introduction by Alessandro Ludovico, researcher, artist and editor-in-chief of Neural magazine since 1993, the first chapters of this book, written by Régine Debatty, Belgian reporter, art critic and founder of we-make-money-not-art.com , Benjamin Gaulon and Jerome Saint-Clair offer a history of the project, a brief history of the Minitel and a deceptively corporate presentation of IoDT.
Teresa Dillon, Irish artist and professor, then turns to notions of repair, maintenance and artistic accidents. Nicolas Nova, who passed away on the last day of 2024, a Franco-Swiss socio-anthropologist, researcher, teacher and curator, offers us an autobiographical history of his youth in France in the 80s, centered around this precursor object of the web. Lori Emerson, American professor, explains the importance of preserving information and communication technologies through her media archaeology laboratory in Boulder (USA). Garnet Hertz, Canadian artist and professor, proposes a vision of media archaeology centered on practice, notably through circuit bending and other forms of hacking.
Janet Gunter, English activist with the Repair Right movement in England, discusses activism aimed at extending the right to repair from a legislative point of view. Spider Alex, a French sociologist and cyber-feminist, explores issues of technological sovereignty and, along with Margarita Padilla, Fieke Jansen and Benjamin Cadon, offers us the tools to tackle this notion in concrete terms.
In conclusion, Geert Lovink, founder of the Dutch Institute for Network Culture, proposes the concepts of perma-hybridity and extraction rebellion.
The operating system and dedicated hardware are open source.
ISBN: 979-10-415-4978-8
Contact: Institute of Network Cultures
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org
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www.networkcultures.org/publications
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