General Journal of Network Requests
Since the mass adoption of the internet, people, governments, and businesses became progressively more interconnected. New ways of doing business started to emerge, sparking the interest of government entities and agencies. Many controversies have been unveiled, various regulations have been introduced, and some bans have been applied. However, the market around personal data is still expanding, and privacy and anonymity are becoming harder to actively maintain. Despite that, there are still ways of contrasting this trend, out of which one is via the use of ad-blockers, like uBlock Origin (uBO).
This one, specifically, lets the user view a log of all the requests that websites send to the browser when there’s the need to download or upload data. So, I decided to record one for 12 hours, and to store it inside a general journal of around 860 pages. The raw data has been processed through the weaponisation of closed-source services and software, such as Google Sheets and Adobe InDesign, and the format constitutes the physical enunciation of what is usually done with those same data. The only difference is that those requests, either redirected or blocked by uBO, have not made it through.
The book (18×24×6 cm, 858 pages) has been entirely set with Neue Haas Grotesk via a .jsx script which made use of the basil.js library.
It was first displayed during the 4th edition of Mediazioni Algoritmiche, and has won the BestBook award for design books at the 5th edition of Oggetto Libro.
View more photos and scans on Behance.
