Kairos Telegraph
Conceptual website and archive. Kairostelegraph.com
2016-2024
Kairos Telegraph was a conceptual website that I designed consisting of two pages. The first was a landing page where an event occured for 10 seconds. Every hour an image of a painted canvas was randomly selected from a set of 24. When visitors arrived that image could be viewed for 10 seconds. Clicking through took the visitor to the archive page that showed a record of every event that has happened each hour since the website’s creation in 2016.
Initially the project was developed to explore the digital culture of immediacy and simulation facilitated by the internet. The original paintings created were destroyed and exist only as digital images. The website ended up also revealing the complex systems at work when humans and technologies collaborate. It seems simple to program an action - to randomly select an image every hour and record it. What wasn’t accounted for was the complex system allowing the website to exist which revealed a schedule of maintenance by the website’s server. As seen by the archival record, many evenings the website “went to sleep” at different times, while the system is maintained/altered, with less regularity in the last few years, as this maintance practice seemed to have changed.
In the end, rather than existing as a straightforward technological product, the website was an organism entangled with complex parts and patterns of human and technological intervention, causing unprogrammed irregularities to occur. The glitch in the programming became the focal point, as these irregularities mimic the patterns of humans and make it seem more lifelike than robotic, taking a break every night instead of working. In 2024 the website met its death and now lives in memory - an archive of an archive - in the internet archive.