Back to Intermittence, or RediscoveringWeb-Materiality: An Artistic Quest for aSustainable Internet Aesthetics

Abstract

Through the digital and public artwork Solar Protocol (2020-ongoing) artists and engineers Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, and Benedetta Piantella kickstarted a solar-powered server network that hosts a web page demonstrating how intermittent energy levels affect its very aesthetics and usability. This small-scale participatory experiment stimulates a wider reflection on the interconnection between economic, environmental, behavioral, and aesthetic features that shape the way the Internet is produced and consumed in today’s society. Far from being a mere matter of greening Internet’s power supply, the artwork rather turns a spotlight on the implicit attitudes of web producers and consumers as developed by the attention economy. Despite a growing consciousness in the IT community of the web’s current non unsustainability, the role of the problem’s aesthetic roots and behavioral consequences have so far been only faintly acknowledged. Leaning on the technological and cultural commentary offered by Solar Protocol, particularly its ‘natural’ and participatory logic in the programming and powering of a digital infrastructure, the paper stresses the Internet’s resource problems on the supply side and perceptual problems on the demand side, which combined give the distorted impression of an ever-growing, always available, instantaneously responding, and utterly immaterial web. Framing the ongoing debate on sustainability practices in the progressive digital community, and the behavioral challenges connected to the perception and use of the Internet, as well as the art historical precedents to Solar Protocol, the paper argues that the artists’ experimental work will have lasting influence on the way art activists seek creative solutions providing concrete answers to environmental sustainability, though firmly grounded in artistic grammar.