É. Urcades

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November 7

It would be a mistake to characterize our work as that which is strictly technologically interesting.

Sure, Urbit is a virtual machine, a virtual computer running in your everyday commodity operating system, a peer-to-peer network, a new conception of how a personal computer might be constructed, architected, and otherwise designed, but basing one’s understanding of Urbit as a project in technological terms misses the point.

Ceramics are frequently cited as being one of the older human arts, originating in Paleolithic times. Pottery may have come along a bit later, according to some sources.

There’s this notion that computers these days are done,

there’s little left in the way of

exploring what constitutes a personal, commodity, workaday

computer that anyone might use. We have phones,

tiny supercomputers, head-mounted displays,

virtual reality goggles,

and

while the

physical form factors

of computers are evolving

and integrating themselves closer

to people’s bodies, there’s a sense

that at the abstract hearts of these devices,

the thing we call computer is essentially frozen.

Imagining a world where “ceramics” are conceived as pottery, as vessels, and as

only vessels

is a little silly, but a point stands:

Computers can be infinitely formed as clay can be infinitely formed.

Clay, and its rendering into ceramic material, doesn’t find its only use in the formation of vessels.

Clay as a material has been used to form ancient toys, currencies, bricks, entire buildings, entire architectural movements, statues, jewelry, tools, and a huge variety of other useful objects.

I feel like we live in a world where the vast potential of “computers” as a material has been formed into a single shape and left to gather dust. This is the formalism of Unix, of Linux, of unix-like software, of files, of C, of Bell Labs, of client/server, of mega corporations, etc.

Urbit is a nascent

project with the aim

of reintroducing

a computer with

a fundamentally different shape

than the computers we know now.

~

Title: November 7

Description: Ceramics

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

~

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