About
What we called surfing, we now call sharing. What was once cyberspace and The Net are now platforms. All of these are metaphors, but we might be less likely to notice them as such, because this is how dominant metaphors work – as infrastructures.
N. Markham, Annette, Weidenberg, Katrin (Ed.), Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity, Peter Lang Publishing, New York 2020, p. 9.
From Net, City, World to Cloud, Market, Sea investigates how we narrate and imagine the Internet with the help of metaphors. Net stands for the relations between various forms of infrastructure; City conceives cyberspace as an urban and social site; World focuses on utopias beyond the laws of physics and politics; Cloud marks the Internet as an ephemeral and decentralized repository; Market zeroes in on the commercialization of Web3; and Sea opens up the metaphor of water for the digital data stream.
On the basis of these six terms, the project traces various narratives, experiences, and points of historicity of the Internet. It moves from the overarching metaphors of the Internet to concrete visual manifestations and attempts to historicize the Internet and its linguistic imaginaries.
From Net, City, World to Cloud, Market, Sea is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin and takes place in collaboration with /rosa, diffrakt zentrum für theoretische peripherie e.V., Hopscotch Reading Room, and panke.gallery. The project entails a publication, a reading group, a workshop, and six public events.
