in a data centre, but in a plastic box in a garden in South East London. The box sits beneath a reclaimed 190W solar panel which was made in 2002.

The solar panel charges a 12.8V battery which supplies enough energy to power a mini computer in the plastic box. This website lives on that computer. It's a small experiment to see how computer networks can be integrated with care into the ecosystems in which they're used.

A Concrete Garden

I call this site a Garden Zine* (or perhaps Samizdata?) because it works from the ground up, documenting and cultivating (in a slow-paced and desultory fashion) connections between the place where it is hosted, its co-inhabitants, and seasonal, social and technological pressures and variations. The aspiration is to make the links between technology and its physical contingencies concrete and visible.

*You don't need to have a garden to have a Garden Zine: the emphasis is on local work and the act of bringing a place under cultivation.

Not always-on

This website is intermittently available by design. It needs the sun to shine, at least a little bit, to run and be accessible. If it's available now, and you are here, you could look at some statistics to see how often the site has been online.

Like most websites, it may not last for very long.