Tim Rodenbröker

Massive Update on the 128kb Challenge 💾

Added 2024-04-12 15:08:31 +0000 UTC

Dear Creative Coders, 👋

I hope you are doing great! In this newsletter I want to inform you about the most recent developments for the 128kb challenge. But before I go into the details, I'd like to tell you a bit about the background and the idea of this platform.

In the last years, while building trcc, I thought a lot about the idea of creating a dedicated digital gallery space for the Creative Coding community. I always felt very inspired by initiatives like “36 Days of Type" or the DEMO Festival where designers from all over the world submitted their word, even though I did not like the high dependency on noisy platforms like Instagram. I think it is great to make use of them, but a gallery should have an own domain on the internet i think.

But... running an own platform is a difficult technical challenge. It simply comes with many obstacles. For example, hosting hundreds of high resolution digital artworks costs a lot of server power and space. Also there’s the question of how people connect with each other on such a platform.

After circling around these ideas and this challenge, I at some point asked myself a question that was turned out to become a solution: How would how an extremely minimal version of a social network, of a gallery for trcc could look like? I thought back to the days, when the Internet very different from today: What techniques did people use to create online community spaces?

It turned out that one of my main principles in my creative work, using tight constraints in design, was a part of the answer answer. I came up with the idea of the “the 128kb challenge”, a minimal platform for coded creativity, where the limitations even formed the name and the the identity. Now it is alive: 128kb is an online platform that explores, promotes, exhibits and celebrates artistic works within narrow technical boundaries from the Creative Coding ecosystem.

In the last weeks I spent quite some time building a solid foundation in the shape of a website (with Wordpress) and even was also abled to form a team of amazing people who will support me in the development of the project: Felix Martinez will act as a close partner and consultant, Lena Weber and Monica Losada will help me with the curation. I so am excited to see where this goes in the next months and years!