Blog 01 ｜Reading
An internet of old things
1.1 What is it?
In the first part, the paper first builds on the original old ‘Internet of Things’ concept (when a new object is created, the service creates a unique two-dimensional barcode for that object, which can be printed out and attached to it.) This then leads to an exploration of the modern, digital ‘Internet of Things’.
In the second part, the author explores things and linearity in the wider context of the Internet, which because of the existence of linear adhesions allows everything to exist on the web in the form of information, allowing people’s memories to be closely related to things. It then divides the current labels of new consumer artefacts into three categories along a linear timeline: past, present and future. This ultimately leads to the main question posed in this paper: can the Internet of Things escape the inertia of a society that uses the theoretical basis of purpose in many of its methods of production and manufacture? I think this is a dialectical way of looking at whether the connection between people and society and things can be severed and whether new developments are possible.
In the third part, the author concentrates mainly on analysis, and he uses a number of examples. The first is the different ways in which connections are made between individuals, friends and family, in terms of social relations, public image and biological connections respectively. The author then uses cosmetic surgery to correct genetic traits and films from the past five years that show a more creative way of understanding the past in terms of class and period context.
In the fourth section, the author is involved in a creative/technical project called ‘Remember Me’. This project enables an additional connection between people and objects by attaching the memory of the corresponding donor to the tags of items sold in charity shops. This allows the objects to be enriched with an immaterial dimension. The project further explores the potential of digital technology to network the past and develop a ‘network of old things’.
1.2 Does it connect to your practice?
I think it has some relevance to my experimental project. The author’s project “RememberMe” is supported by the “Tales of Things” technical framework, which provides theoretical support for my project. The web port interface has a lot of scope for development, as it also uses an interactive approach, allowing the information about the item to be represented in a single QR code, enabling the conversion of devices and the interchange of information. My future projects will probably use the same concept to achieve two-way interaction between people and things, and people and machines.
But on the other hand, I think there is still room for more development of this concept, perhaps going beyond the limitations of QR codes and barcodes to create new ways of connecting people to things and people to machines, and I hope that in future projects there will be more room for development.
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