The Potato Internet (working title) is an experimental small-scale social network, created by Caroline Sinders and Trammell Hudson to envision the internet in times of climate emergency and the global energy crisis.
When imagining alternatives for today’s toxic and extractivist online world, the common criticism often comes down to: "but they don’t scale up". But what if the future of the internet is all about scaling down?
In Potato Internet, the small scale allows the artists to build a functioning social network from scratch, rethinking all layers of the system, from hardware to protocols and governance. An 'anti-scale' network can be framed in a local context and endorse slow communication.
For the physical framework, the artists experiment with potatoes as a source of energy, and with e-waste and other recycled materials for the interface. The governance of the network, its safety, equity and codes of conduct draw on Sinders' work on the Feminist Data Set.
Potato Internet will be presented as an installation designed to fit in a suitcase.
The project is realised as a residency production hosted by M-cult in context of the European Media Art Platform EMAP in 2022, with support from the Creative Europe Programme..