how to slow internet is an artist project focused on experimentation with small scale communication technology in order to better consider the large scale communications and energy infrastructure on which we depend. Collective members include people who are artists, designers, writers, curators, organizers, technologists, and academics in locations around the world. We meet seasonally to discuss ideas, projects, and ways to experiment. That activity is summarized and documented on this site.
As values, beliefs, emotions, attitudes, and habits can be shaped by the infrastructure we use, experimentation offers a way to see systems as the strange and external forces that they are.
When imposed technological infrastructure is so embedded it’s impossible to see, we are urgently hoping to step outside and look at it. Through small scale experiments, both physical and digital, we hope to see the process of how to slow internet.
The many possibilities of how to experiment with and learn about large scale communications and energy infrastructure are explored in real time and physical place at an annual convening called Earth Camp, which is located at Deurendis in New York. Earth Camp is a time to practice the work of care and maintenance.
In between annual convenings we meet online to share updates on independent projects, discuss ideas on our collective efforts, and respond to resources offered from group members.
It is through these cyclical convenings and meetings that we experiment with the 'how' of how to slow internet.
We embrace periodicity, seasonality, and the properties of pattern, repetition, non-linearity, and continuity that are inherent to cyclical systems.
how to slow internet meetings happen cyclically with whomever has the capacity to join at each solstice and equinox.
how to slow internet is a non-academic space that exists in many relations to the academy; relations which could be described with multiple prepositions—under and beside, across and beyond, or that shopworn position of “within and against”. Let there be as many ways to be (in relation to the) academic as there are ways to be non-academic.