When
emotion is an emotion: I am
emotion to announce that this year's iteration of the
Dynamicland archive is complete.
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I chose the May 2016
CHI party as the cutoff. The party was immediately followed by the move to Oakland, and I thought it would be happier to end on a party instead of a move out. The group's work after the move will take its own concerted effort to reconstruct.
The main index lists 214 archive items and 22 sidebars.
Also online are another 214 "unlisted" items which are beyond the May 2016 cutoff, but are linked to from the publications. Or from other archive items... although fully recursing on archive items would end up bringing in the whole thousand, so I restrained myself. I'm happy to add anything that's not there that you want public.
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Many of the unlisted items are marked as "stubs", but most of them are at least somewhat filled out. They're stubs because I made them out of what I could quickly dig up, instead of having swept through all of the material in order, so I don't want to give the impression that they're complete.
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Archive items can contain photos, videos, websites, emails, and tweets. (Tweets looked terrible until, like, yesterday, so I'm pleased that I finally found a nice style for them.)
All of the embedded websites are mirrored, as well as most of the externally-hosted media (on Dropbox, YouTube, etc.) linked to from emails, so the archive is as self-contained as possible. Some links are no longer accessible.
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The entry for "
Dynamicland archive" in the Dynamicland archive will probably change over time, so here's a snapshot of what it is now:
March 2024
Dynamicland archive
You are here.
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 this is a considerable project of its own, and currently 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.
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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.
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Dynamicland was driven into existence by the impossibility of representing and communicating big ideas on a computer screen.
You are probably reading this on a computer screen, so there's some irony here, as well as some real difficulties.
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.
Nevertheless, travelogues are useful. And journals of pioneers, on a long enough time scale, can prove invaluable.
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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.
There's still a lot of website work left (mostly the Intro, the FAQ, the Improvising Cellular Playgrounds talk, and the Communal Science proposal), but the biggest part is officially done.