User:Kiara/Special Issue 27
Directed by Imane B. K. & Martino Morandi (Constant) General page: https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/See_you_many_times!
Introduction
An extended moment where we will see time from different angles and in different technological manifestations
The introduction day pad
Draw yourself as a clock
My clock is sitting on an armchair, resting with a warm cup of tea and trying to escape it own thoughts. Entangled between the rush of life, overthinking and attention deficit leading to a lot of zoning out and daydreaming, it doesn't know when is the right time for either.
It indicates lot of different times, as it is never right on time.
The purple time is 13:13 (a mirror hour I often get)
The red time is 22:22 (another mirror hour I often get)
The black time is the one that passes "normally", but it is itself a bit confused, hence its zig-zag shape.
Readings
- Executing Micro-Temporality – A collective reading
- In-depth: Time Consciousness and Discipline in the Industrial Revolution
Telecom Museum
22-04-2025
We took the morning to visit the Telecom Museum in Rotterdam Noord!
We got a full commented tour of the museum, the first stop was the basement where we could see all the communication cables, directing phone calls and internet. They will probably soon disappear to be replaced by optical fibre.
Getting back upstairs, we got a little history about the telefonistas from this picture:
The picture was taken in The Hague. The women there were in charge of 300 switches each. At this time, there was a law preventing women to enjoy the privilege of having both a career and a life: they had to chose between marriage and work. This law was aborted in 1960. Back then, communication-wise, it took up to 4 hours to establish a phone connection between cities. This type of communication was mostly used by companies. The telefonistas were also the ones giving time to people, there were no clocks so people would call the phone center to have the time! Then, a big machine automated that process and people were calling the machine instead of the telefonistas.
External ref: Las Chicas del Cable (Netflix show, must watch)
The rest of the museum was filled with super interesting objects and devices, here are pictures:
We also saw nice clocks:
Dismantling hardware
12-05-2025
This is the start of opening and looking at the insides of hardware.
We also had an introduction about crystals by Al.
On mirror hours
PROJECT PITCH: a small program that runs in the background and automatically launches at laptopt start. The program reads the clock and takes a screenshot of it whenever there is a mirror hour or an inverted mirror hour. It then saves the screenshots in a dedicated folder. Could end up being a zine or a small auto-updating website to showcase the images.
In the meantime, I manually take screenshots on my phone everytime I encounter one of these hours.
Notes, tools and tips
cronfor cron jobs (things you want to happen every certain cycle of time ex. everyday, every 10hours, etc.) > https://crontab.guru/every-month- browser extension can take automatic screenshots but then the browser should be opened for the program to run and it's a bit messy
- look into Fred's project structure to get inspiration?
UPDATE: This program project is now abandoned. I will focus on the screenshots I took on my phone (they will stop on June 9th since I started on May 9th) and some notes I've been writing (see below). I have 121 screenshots of mirror hours taken between May 9th and June 9th, I'm not sure I will use them.
Links dump
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_number (maths)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortunate_number (maths)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck#Numerology
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology#Angel_numbers
- https://www.wikihow.com/Mirror-Numbers
Thinking about the immortality of the crab
The text has been moved to this Dedicated wiki page, to be turned into a zine through the Wikimedia API.
Prototyping Classes
Interview with a tool
06-05-2025
with Manetta
Notes about calendar
cultural: In what culture(s) did this tool emerge within? Academic? Industry? Community? Artistic? And what cultural practices did emerge around this tool?
- When you search the web for "calendar" the first page is only filled with online calendar platforms. No definition/wiki entry
- The term calendar is taken from kalendae, the term for the first day of the month in the Roman calendar, related to the verb calare "to call out", referring to the "calling" of the new moon when it was first seen. Latin calendarium meant 'account book, register' (as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each month)
- First calendar in Ancient Near East: Bronze Age Egyptian + Sumerian, mostly based on Babylonian calendar
- Babylonian calendar: a lunisolar calendar used in Mesopotamia from around 2000 BC to 294 BC
- Lunisolar: combines monthly moon cycles with solar year
- First calendar in Orient: Vedic Indian calendar (linked to rituals)
- During classical Greece, lots of calendars that then gave rise to the Ancient Roman calendar and Hindu calendars - but also Chinese, Hebrew and Gregorian calendars
- Hellenic calendars: 12 lunar months
- Ancient Roman calendar: 12 lunar months, starting and ending with the new moon + additional days to match the seasons
- Hindu calendars (Panchanga): new year starts in spring. to adjust the missmatch between lunar months and solar days, they add a full month every 32 or 33 month so that festivals and rituals fall in the right season. still used today for festival dates. The Hindu calendar is also important to the practice of Hindu astrology and zodiac system.
- Caesar reformed the roman calendar in 46 BC that introduced the leap day every four year to correct the missmatch between moon and sun, still contained errors that were mostly corrected by the Gregorian calendar in 1582.
The World Calendar
a proposal to reform the Gregorian calendar so that every year is exactly the same = perennial calendar.
2 leap days that are not weekdays but full holidays to align and make up for the difference in solar time, and so that every year can follow the same pattern
all the benefits listed for this calendar are tied to economy and education. Very capitalistic
THIS is a real benefit:
"Because the World Calendar is perpetual, there is no need to churn out copies of it every year."
criticism is mainly from religions about the intercalary days that are out of the week and disrupt the 7-day cycle
The International Fixed Calendar
a proposal to reform the Gregorian calendar so that every year is exactly the same = perennial calendar.
13 months of 28 days + one extra day at the end of the year - the 13th month is inserted between June and July and name sol
one leap day between June 28 and Sol 1, happens when the year number is divisible by four but not when it is divisible by 100
The Hanke-Henry calendar
a proposal to reform the Gregorian calendar so that every year is exactly the same = perennial calendar.
reducing years to 364 days and adding a week every 5 or 6 years, which prevents the weekday drift
Different types of calendars
- lunar - such as the Islamic calendar
- solar - such as the Persian calendar (first developed in Ancient Egypt)
- lunisolar - such as traditional Chinese, Hindu and Hebrew calendars
Very commonly a calendar includes more than one type of cycle or has both cyclic and non-cyclic elements.
Interview
- Hello calendar. Your current shape has been determined by years and years of evolution and civilizations. What was your first shape and when was it born?
Bronze Age with the development of writing in Ancient Near East
8042 BC: Kojoda, a calendar created by the Yoruba people in West Africa
~ 9000/10 000 BC: Wurdi Youang, a stone arrangement in Australia – egg shaped, 50m diameter
8000 BC: Warren Field, the oldest lunisolar calendar – aligned stones in a straight-ish line
- Does it make sense to flatten and align years through a perennial calendar? why?
it helps perceiving time maybe, and planning? but ultimately it is also a bit sad, every month might end up feeling the same, it might feel quite dull on an emotional level. Also, menstruation cycles tend to align with the moon cycles, and fixing a calendar in such a way could get a bit disturbing. Also, cultures and people calculate time differently, hence the various types of calendars used around the world. Why do we need to always make things "international"? It is a fake way to erase differences, an illusion, and we don't need that, we need to embrace the differences rooted in our cultures and celebrate them.
- When looking your name up in a search engine we don't get offered a definition or your wiki page, only calendar tools. what does it say about the world's perception of calendars?
Have you been transformed into a merely capitalistic performance-evaluation tool? calendars were first conceived as time-keeping tools, slowly they evolved into time-managing ones. And management is now revolving around labour and employment. In a way calendars are nowadays a tool for proficiency and profit. If it doesn't fit your timetable, it means you're not organized and therefore unfit to this society.
- You are based on nature cycles -the moon, the sun, the seasons- but you are displayed into a grid. Is that yet another sign that human kind feels safer when putting things in boxes?
- How have you been reshaped and transformed in pop culture works?
Keywords
tracking -- predicting -- timekeeping -- ritual --
Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_calendars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calendars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wurdi_Youang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Field
Notes with Charlie & Wyn
The Overlord calendar (European, kind of global calendar)
The need for a calendar to be functional!!! It needs space to write down events, we don't use a calendar to look up the date, but to have a sense of events and time-planning.
We don't want a calendar to become a bureaucratic tool, it is somehow quite personal.
What if techbros finally colonize Mars and realize they have to rebuild a whole new perception of time, because the movement of that planet around the Sun is different from the one of Earth. And they go crazy and lose their minds.
About the Fediverse
14-05-2025
with Manetta
A wiki for the day: https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Fediverse
A pad for the day: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/prototype_Debby
We set up a new XPUB server, she's called Debby.
Now researching and discussing the Fediverse and what it is linked to so we can decide collectively whether we want to install Mastodon on the server and set up an XPUB instance or not.
Notes on ActivityPub
from the ActivityPub website:
- ActivityPub is a family of protocols, data models, and architectures useful for building decentralized social media apps and services.
ActivityPub is the standard that allows different web apps to interact
- Entered the W3C standards in 2018
- Used by all fediverse platforms (mastodon, peertube, plume, etc.)
- "ActivityPub supports common social network activities like following, liking, announcing, adding, and blocking. For example, if you have an account on a Mastodon instance like mastodon.social, you can follow someone on a WriteFreely instance like Qua and receive updates whenever they have a new blog post." (https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/introduction-to-activitypub/508)
- The purpose is to remove central control over social networks and allow fore more freedom – Christine Lemmer-Webber (formerly may have been known as Christopher, co-author of ActivityPub) said: "One thing you may have noticed in the last decade is that many decentralized free software social networking applications have been written. Sadly, most of those applications can’t actually speak to each other – a fractured federation. I hope that with ActivityPub, we’ve improved that situation."
PROTOCOLS:
- Server to server "Federation protocol" → distributes activities and objects between actors on different servers
- Client to server "Social API" → for client software to interact with actors and their data
VOCABULARY:
- Objects: Describes an object of any kind. The Object type serves as the base type for most of the other kinds of objects defined in the Activity Vocabulary
- Activities: An Activity is a subtype of Object that describes some form of action that may happen, is currently happening, or has already happened
- Actors: Actor types are Object types that are capable of performing activities.
- The core Actor Types include: Application, Group, Organization, Person, Service
LINKS:
https://activitypub.rocks/
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/guide-for-activitypub-users
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/introduction-to-activitypub/508/1
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#bib-Activity-Vocabulary
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#actor-types
https://cassolotl.medium.com/i-left-mastodon-yesterday-4c5796b0f548
Setting a Mastodon instance
This implies some questions we have to answer:
- What is customizable and what is not, from the software itself?
- How open is the registration?
- Guidelines / code of conduct
- Moderation / maintenance / sysadmin
Notes on GoToSocial
https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/v0.19.1/
It is a beta software that connects to (not yet all) fediverse servers, licensed under the GNU AGPL v3 License
As it is still in beta there are some bugs, tracked on Codeberg
It is funded by crowdfunding and an NLnet grant > very European centered!
They also accept corporate sponsorship with this statement:
- GoToSocial is open to sponsorship arrangements with organizations that align with our values. To show our thanks for your support, we will display your logo, website, and a short tagline on the repository and documentation.
GoToSocial is an ActivityPub social network server written in Golang – from the official Go website:
- Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.
What Go looks like:
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Println("Hello, 世界")
}
which returns: Hello, 世界
It is comparable to Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica and PixelFed, there is no recommendation algorithm, the timeline in chronological
- "This federated approach also means that you aren't beholden to arbitrary rules from some gigantic corporation potentially thousands of miles away. Your server has its own rules and culture; your fellow server residents are your neighbours; you will likely get to know your server admins and moderators, or be an admin yourself."
- "This project sprang up in February/March 2021 out of a dissatisfaction with the safety + privacy features of other Federated microblogging/social media applications, and a desire to implement something a little different."
Differences from Mastodon (as far as i know)
- Has an RSS feed option, to mark your profile as RSS compatible!
- Rich text formatting (markdown) by default
- Themes and custom css (without having to use a web extension like Stylus)
- Light and not too energy consuming:
- GoToSocial uses only about 250-350MiB of RAM, and requires very little CPU power, so it plays nice with single-board computers, old laptops and tiny $5/month VPSes.
- No external dependencies apart from a database (or just use SQLite!).
- Simply download the binary + assets (or Docker container), tweak your configuration, and run
- No integrated client front-end, just a generic backend server (like Matrix), static pages and API - devs are encouraged to build their own front-end implementation
Notes on kind.social
A server aiming to a broad community and to foster a genuinely enjoyable social experience → 1.1K active users!! They are tagged under the "geeks and nerds" category but i don't get why because it is not explicit in the about, except for saying they welcome everyone (still lots of posts about FF and RPGs and Twitch channels High emphasis on banning hate speech
- CWs, alt text and PascalCase hashtags are recommended in the CoC
- "Small businesses & independent creators, along with their self-promotion, are welcomed and encouraged. However, no big corp/org advertising, spam, or accounts. No crypto advertising, spam, or accounts. No "AI" advertising, spam, or accounts. No proselytizing or preaching."
- Automated and bot accounts are allowed but must be tagged as such
There's not much more in the CoC, it's a bit short but they aim for a large inclusion so that's nice When browsing the live feed there is actually a lot of posts tagged with CWs, even one that has a "sewing" CW so people are really building this kind community
LINKS OF INSPIRING INSTANCES: