Cyber Cafe

exhibition • 02 Aug 2024 – 08 Sep 2024

More info

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’s young people’s collective the Society of Explorers have collaborated with artists Antonio Roberts and Lucy Cheesman over a series of workshops, experimenting with open-source platforms and old technologies. Together they have designed an interactive exhibition reimagining the creative potential of the internet cafe of today.

With Antonio Roberts, the group explored digital relics from the early years of the internet. SoE-Cities is inspired by the playful and fleeting nature of GeoCities web archives. The Explorers embraced the creative tone and DIY style of these early websites, offering an alternative to the sense of permanence expressed in their current social media profiles.

For Myspace GIFs, they experimented with the personality signifiers that people used to decorate their social media pages when these spaces had more potential for customisation.

Through creating a series of playful and spontaneous images with the Game Boy Camera, the group were able to be more creative and less self-conscious about appearing in photos due to the blocky pixelated nature of the images.

Working with Lucy Cheesman, the group collected a range of sounds and samples across the city to generate their own sample pack. Over several workshops, the Explorers experimented with making these samples into beats using the open-source software Strudel. This workshop was represented as a web cafe within the exhibition, allowing audiences to engage with and make their own algorithmic music. When the computers are not in use, their screens would be animated with screen savers designed by members of the group using Hydra coding language.

Dial Up Dream is a new collaborative work by Lucy Cheesman and Antonio Roberts. The piece combines a live coding performance on TidalCycles with a live visual score using modular synthesizers, containing audio samples and analogue footage produced by the Explorers. As well as soundtracking the space, you can also experience the audio through vibrations in the viewing platform.

Resources

The following websites were used in the exhibition by the Society of Explorers to create their work. You can access them any time and they are free to use.

https://hydra.ojack.xyz/ – A free to use live codable video synth.
https://strudel.cc/workshop/getting-started/ – Make music with code in real time
https://mmm.page/ – Free to use website builder that looks similar aesthetically to GeoCities

Glossary

Game Boy Camera

Originally released in 1998, the Game Boy Camera is a grayscale digital camera accessory for the Nintendo Game Boy. It captures images at a resolution of 128 x 112 pixels.

Hydra

Hydra is a platform for live coding visuals, designed to allow users to create real-time visual effects and projections through code.

Open-source

Open-source software is designed to be publicly accessible and free to use, modify, and distribute.

Strudel

Strudel is an open-source platform that enables users to create music through code.

GeoCities

Founded in 1994, GeoCities was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish their own websites for free. It was one of the first platforms to make web publishing accessible to the general public.

Myspace

Myspace is a social networking site that was launched in 2003. It allowed users to create personal profiles, connect with friends, share music, photos, and videos, and customise their page layouts.

TidalCycles

TidalCycles is a live coding environment designed for creating patterns of sound, allowing users to generate music in real-time using code.

The Society of Explorers regularly test workshops and ideas before launching them publicly. At Cyber Cafe you could take part in a dynamic programme of events, engaging with technology in innovative and accessible ways refined by the Explorers. See our upcoming events here.

View our Make Music Through Live Coding workshop with Lucy Cheesman here.

Artists

Society of Explorers

Site Gallery’s youth collective Society of Explorers have been meeting weekly at the gallery for over ten years. During this time they have been a vital voice in shaping how Site works with young people. The group of 14-19 year olds collaborate with artists and the Site Gallery team to get involved in the artistic programme, develop projects, events and ideas.

Antonio Roberts

Antonio Roberts is an artist, musician and curator based in Birmingham, UK. His practice is concerned with how the misuse of digital technology impacts people of colour and other marginalised groups.

His recent work focuses on the depiction of Black people in digital media, ranging from stereotypical misrepresentations in early video games to modern algorithms and AI codifying existing biases.

His (Algo|Afro) Futures mentoring programme teaches live coding software as a way to address how Black people have been under/mispreresented in digital art and electronic music, despite being pivotal to its development.

He is currently learning game development, with the aim to explore how immersive environments can be used as a narrative storytelling device. He is also working on his debut EP, created using a combination of live coding software and hardware synthesisers.

Lucy Cheesman

Lucy Cheesman is a sound artist, musician, producer and organiser whose work can be placed within a number of different fields, often blurring the boundary between the visual, the audible and the digital.

Lucy is a founder member of SONA (a network supporting women in Sheffield through experimental sound and digital practices) and the Yorkshire Sound Women Network. Along with her artistic practice she also makes music under the name Heavy Lifting, using software such as TidalCycles and FoxDot – open-sourced coding programmes aimed at opening up the processes of experimental music production for the benefit of the wider public.

Lucy’s involved in a wide breadth of activity across the city, and this is symptomatic of her approach to creative practices. She rigorously tests the possibilities of multiple different mediums, never settling on the prescribed way of producing art.