Towards Critical Computing: a Template for Animated Documentary

Abstract

This thesis presents a 3-minute short titled "Through The Internet," which presents at a high level the architecture of the Internet, the world's most ubiquitous and pre-eminent technological infrastructure. The short's critical intention is to convey that the Internet, though often imagined as a cloud, is actually enabled by a global, physical infrastructure of cables, routers, and other hardware that are subject to material and geopolitical exigencies. It explains the larger critical mode in which the short is conceived, the process of making the short, and sketches a template for 'animated documentary' of computing infrastructure in general.