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The Spinning Wheel of Life

Winnie Soon, Aarhus University

This project challenges the perception of a throbber as a transitional object, an icon that spins as we wait for content to be delivered onto our screens. For this prototype, a software application listens to a range of IP addresses in real-time and displays a series of ellipses based on network packet arrivals. These series of ellipses will resemble a familiar animated icon – the throbber – that is visually is visually displayed in concert with the Youtube 8-bit video game music playlist. This throbber spins, not because it is waiting for data to arrive, but instead it is programmed to spin as the machine receives data and stores them in a buffer for immediate retrieval. By subverting the usual functioning of a throbber, how might we engage with a throbber in a different way? How might we see beyond the negative connotations of this “spinning wheel of death,” which has become a cultural object and used commonly in contemporary software culture?

Data is streamed through different speeds and sites across network connections, devices and nodes. This work reveals the microtemporality of a data stream that is not often made visible to us.

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