Experimental Chatroom

Workshop for the 2020 Hackers and Designers Summer Academy

with Xin Xin and Lark VCR

Etherpad Directory ☆♬○♩

Connections all the way down ☆♬○♩

Flowers in Chania

Workshop description ☆♬○♩

How might we begin to exit established forms of social media and infrastructures of surveillance? Experimental Chatroom is a week-long workshop that explores the histories of micro-social-medias and uses p5.js to build experimental chatrooms from scratch. As a means to think beyond Web 2.0, participants will design their own chatroom interfaces and explore playful and embodied ways of communicating with each other by including features such as collaborative drawing and interactive play.

Workshop materials and discussions will address pressing issues of how we can build inclusive, collaborative, and considerate online spaces. Templates and tutorials will be provided for both a peer-to-peer chatroom (using Simple Peer and Node.js) and also a chatroom with a backend database to archive chats and support user authentication.

The peer-to-peer model offers alternatives to surveillance capitalism, while the database backend model allows for the archival and building of collective memory. Through a comparison between decentralized and centralized networks, we will consider ways that the architecture of online spaces impacts community interactions.