March 2024

Dynamicland archive

This archive attempts to collect the primary sources (photos, videos, emails, notes) associated with every project of the Dynamicland research group and community, and organize, connect, and contextualize them.

There are almost a thousand such projects, so the archive is a huge project of its own, and incomplete.

But most of the groundwork has been laid, and archiving will procede in installments over several years until it catches up with the present.

Currently, the main list is complete through May 2016, but there are a couple hundred unlisted projects accessible through links.

If the projects archived here are the “trees”, then the Publications attempt to show the “forest” — the bigger picture, the whys.

Many publications are filled with examples that link back to projects in this archive.

The publications were all prepared for a public audience. By contrast, the archive consists largely of internal documentation: casual photos, internal videos, discussions on the private mailing list.

This is out of necessity (it’s what we have), but we also hope it gives a truer picture of what pioneering a new medium actually looks like.

We started Dynamicland because we were convinced it was impossible to represent and communicate big ideas on a computer screen. If you are reading this on a computer screen, there’s some irony here.

In the same way that one can't truly understand a foreign culture by reading about it — you actually have to go live there a while — we've found that people require real immersion in the Dynamicland culture before they start to get it.

We do not expect anyone to truly understand Realtalk and Dynamicland from looking at a website. But sometimes travelogues can be valuable.

These web pages are designed to be preserved.

The HTML is simple and easily parsed. CSS and JavaScript are minimal and optional. All media files are visible to crawlers. There are no frameworks or external dependencies.

For making of, see Dynamicland website (2024).