Hostile Platforms / Beloved Margins
solo show with Everest Pipkin - curated by Sakrowski and Noemi Garay
About the exhibition
The history of the internet is not a timeline of platforms, but it would be easy to confuse one for another. From a distance, the story of internet technologies becomes a litany of companies, interest groups, startups, funding bubbles and hype cycles. But if you ask any individual person about their history “online” the story is almost always people– this forum, that hobby, a movie night, a server, a raid group, a shared goal, a comment section. Connections of personal meaning that have lasted, even if the platform they were hosted on has crumbled. The history of the internet is a history of people constructing homes together, even temporarily in the margins.
This is a retrospective of browser-based works from the last decade, from the lens of (or lack of) stability practices on corporate platforms. Depreciated API keys, banned bots, obsolete scripts, revoked permissions, and projects that live on in screenshots, documentation, print materials, or memory are common here. But there are other, far stronger kinds of connective structures than a shared platform, and the new flourishing of handmade web tools gesture at a world in which we are less beholden to platform capitalism– where we have not just more tools but the right tools, tools with an inbuilt ideology for the better world they seek to build.
Artist
Everest Pipkin is a game developer, artist, and educator who works in games and software tools across the handmade web– as well as on paper through books, zines and drawings. They have shown and spoken at The Design Museum of London, The Texas Biennial, The XXI Triennale of Milan, The Photographers Gallery of London, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and currently teach game design at the Pratt Institute. They believe the internet is a public good, and the post office should operate it.
