'Domain naming' explores how naming is placemaking. Domain names are used to extend questions of identity, territory, and colonialism onto digital space.

As language is world-shaping, names draw borders, territories, and relations. Online, this is literally so: names identify domains of control. It is in our protocols, programming languages, and processes does the act of naming become the act of domaining. Technically, the DNS protocol names to point; ideologically, language always a collective project. As domains are drawn, naming becomes a constructing, situated act.

The web(site) and homepage is visited as a place we inhabit in the process of becoming its name. We extend ourselves in names, fill them, situate them; we embed the history of ourselves unto a name. Should limitations of real-world language be mapped directly onto cyberspace? Might it only accelerate or exacerbate real-world inequities? Can a more critical, poetic reimagining of the internet feel like we are building a world so emergent that we cannot name, but must sound & point?

♡

( This research began in early 2023 and was first delivered... )
August 11, 2023
for Naive Yearly in Copenhagen
Organized by Kristoffer Tjalve

( It is constantly being expanded, adapted, and built upon... And needs to be reordered! )