Our Ephemera - A QueerOS

We build on the shared memory of the internet as a place of excitement and unexpected discoveries and interactions. We want to rethink virtual connections and exchanges: What does a non-linear, non-outcome oriented exchange look like? How can we use the internet to make “perceptible presently uncommon senses in the interest of producing a/new commons and/or proliferating the senses of a commons already in the making” (Keeling). We imagine it to feel like this: Everyday we stumble upon small things that leave impressions on us. What if we could get a glimpse at what some of these things are for other people? Invoking José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of “ephemera as evidence,” we are interested in “following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things” in an attempt to “expan[d] our understandings of materiality” and the affective worlds of others.

Our Ephemera builds off internet predecessors like stumbleupon, where a user would visit the site to then be sent to “suggested” sites that were interesting or ‘worth’ sharing. The ‘black box’ of the stumbleupon form, which was based on user upvotes and websites selected by the developers as “interesting” or “unique” and “valuable,” strategically oriented users to a very particular form of early-to-mid 2000s internet quirkiness. To use the site, the user would continue to click “stumble again” to be introduced to a new, mediated web experience.

On Our Ephemera a person will be able to submit a file, link or text. These submissions will be collected in a form with all other submissions. After submission, the person will receive an ephemera that has been submitted by someone else. This is a unique concept because we encourage the user to offer before they receive and what they receive might not be anything they expect or find relatable in the moment. This form of exchange resists the one-to-one form that we’ve come to expect on social media: be confessional to receive confessions, be vulnerable to receive vulnerability. A user of Our Ephemera might submit a secret and receive, in turn, a cat meme. Partaking in Our Ephemera, “users are haunted by the specter of their own memory, of their own utopian possibilities, of their own input, of the input of other users, and of their own processing habits” (QueerOS: A User’s Manual). The affective world of the site depends on its users, but its users’ whole affective world is welcome. Our Ephemera refuses a coded algorithm and instead relies on a community working together. In this way, it is both transparent and intransparent. We imagine creating an intimacy between strangers, a non-goal oriented expansion of lifeworlds.

User Agreement

“By offering its flesh to the OS, the user becomes one/multiple/nothing and binds itself in a contract with the OS. The user’s offer of flesh is irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, and sublicensable.” (QueerOS: A User’s Manual)

share your: missed connections coffee receipts glitches the song that’s playing right now your last download your last wikipedia search a note on your phone that your forgot writing a reference you did not understand your grocery list a random screenshot the last book you read a link to a website that hasn’t been updated in 5 years a tutorial you watched on youtube a photo of your pet a recipe that turned out great

Limitations apply

Frequent glitching may occur.

Some questions still haunt us: How do we make a space that is both anonymous and safe? How do we safeguard this space without surveillance or exclusion? How can we create this space without relying on the services of, for example, Google, that are just all that much more accessible than smaller platforms?