On Saturday the 31st of August, I visited the Cyber Cafe exhibition hosted by Site Gallery's Society of Explorers. It was an exhibit brought about through a collaboration with the artists Antonio Roberts and Lucy Cheesman, who also hosted a series of workshops.

Part of the exhibition room with a dark backdrop, a neon green round table of retro computers with keyboards and headsets and in the background, there's a wall with neon green artwork.

Cyber Cafe takes inspiration from the first internet cafes that acted as a site for optimism and excitement at the early potential of the internet. These spaces offered new possibilities for connection, collaboration and creative self expression.

—Site Gallery

My then girlfriend first showed me the posters used to advertise the exhibit so we decide to go one weekend. We pore over the trinkets in the gallery's shop and I buy a book. The book is called “The Artists Who Will Change the World” by Omar Kholeif.

When we enter the gallery space, it's dark yet there are specific points in the room that are screaming in neon colours and bright lights. One of those points was a hexagonal table lit up with a neon yellow tabletop and six old computers. By default, each computer has a visual on the screen created with Hydra but viewers can interact with them to scroll through Strudel documentation - an environment used to make music by writing code. The experience emulates the atmosphere of an internet cafe as you engage with and make your own music.

A computer screen of the Strudel documentation.

Several collections of Game Boy Camera photographs are scattered across the walls of the room with different subjects. The lo-tech pixelated photos really enhancing the retro feel of the exhibit.

There are a few screens in the room. One on a 90s television screen flitting through digital collages of MySpace GIFs and messages on online safety. While writing this, I can't remember the exact content but according to an Our Favourite Places article, those messages talk about Taking the time to disconnect, having a hobby outside of scrolling, and making sure that you control the tabs and that they don't control you.

I believe the main piece was an audiovisual titled “Dial Up Dream”—a collaborative work by Roberts, Cheesman, and the Explorers. It combines a live coding performance with a live visual score, containing audio samples and analogue footage. The interesting part about it was the viewing platform placed opposite where the audience can sit and experience the audio through the vibrations.

The main piece of the exhibition: a wide projector screen of a video of continuously-typing Strudel code with animation and neon graphics in the background. In front of the screen is a neon red and green raised platform with black pillows for people to sit.

Another projector explores digital relics from the early years of the internet. It goes through a series of blogs from the GeoCities web archives. Whether they were real blogs made by real people, I'm not quite sure but sitting down and taking the time to watch and read them, I know that we can learn a thing or two from those past users of cyberspace—about creativity, authenticity, and the way they shaped digital communities before algorithms took centre stage.

I'll admit, reading through and seeing those blogs inspired me to make one similar myself. That's when I stumbled upon Neocities and, lo and behold, that rabbit hole ended up with me developing this little website

I hope to see you in the next post! (Pardon the crass title also). I want this little corner of the internet to be a space for me to talk about all things technology, digital arts, and cyberfeminism. A space where old and new tech converge, reflecting a world captivated by the promise of futuristic innovation and artificial intelligence while nostalgically drawing inspiration from past generations.