In 2021, the artist and engineer Tega Brain, working with a group of colleagues, launched Solar Protocol. It’s a network of solar-powered web servers maintained by volunteers in places including New York, Peterborough, Alice Springs, Nairobi and Beijing. The protocol routes web traffic according to a single parameter: where is the sun shining right now? When you visit a site hosted on the protocol, you are served by the server that currently receives the most sunlight, instead of the one that produces the quickest result. The protocol is not merely a speculation. It’s a functioning piece of internet infrastructure that replaces algorithmic load‑balancing with the diurnal cycle. The sun decides which server powers your online access.
That server in Peterborough brought me to Anne Pasek, Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment at Trent University. At a recent workshop about solar futures at the University of Waterloo, she mentioned that her lab is now building a Mastodon instance on top of that very Solar Protocol node. And she asks: what if our social life online could only happen during peak solar hours? On a rainy day, the server might be down, but perhaps we could gather offline. I found this idea electrifying. I immediately thought: what about the other environmental cycles? The tides, the wind, the tremors underground, the dust in the air?
These rhythms exist on the planet, yet they are entirely absent from our digital timekeeping. They operate on what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls the scale of hyperobjects, something that is too vast or too subtle for our perception. We don’t feel the lunar tide while scrolling a feed. We don’t sense a magnitude‑3.1 quake while an HTTP request crosses the fiber‑optic cables under the ocean. These vibrations and rhythms are structurally excluded from network design, which is not just technical. It reflects a deeper assumption built into the infrastructure itself: that time is a neutral, empty container, indifferent to the world it measures.
To treat time as an empty container is to impose a single, universal grid upon a plentitude of rhythms. It is the very engine of what we might call the silent myth of our digital lives: industrial clock time. Inherited from colonial-capitalist extraction, it organizes our labour, our perception, our sociality around a relentless mechanical beat. Second, minute, hour, week. Nine to five. Weekdays, weekends, holidays. The clocktime actively rounds off or silences other temporalities that are messy and overlapping. The tidal cycle, bound to the moon, from high tide to the next high tide, runs for roughly 12 hours and 25 minutes. Wind speed and airborne particulate matter vary seasonally and geographically, and independently of the working day. Seismic tremors occur constantly, yet almost never cross the threshold of our attention.
To rebind environmental cycles into digital life, I turned to what is lived and most familiar to me: Chinese correlative cosmology.
What exactly is it? Chinese correlative cosmology is neither a single religion nor a single school of thought. It is a vast, distributed system of correspondences and empirical observations, built over centuries by many hands across medicine, agriculture, statecraft, and divination. At its core, a small set of schematic tools yin-yang 阴阳, the five phases 五行, the eight trigrams 八卦 of the Yijing 易经, connect Heaven, Earth, and humanity (天，地，人) into a single, continuously cycling whole. You may have heard of wuxing 五行, often translated as the five elements, though "five phases" is more accurate. They are not static substances but sequential moments in a continuous process: wood gives way to fire, fire to earth, earth to metal, metal to water, and water back to wood. In this tradition, time is not an abstract container into which events are placed. It is a quality of change itself, a tendency, a propensity, what classical Chinese thought calls shi 势. Time here is cyclical, relational, always embedded in the material world.
And this cosmology does not stop at the boundary of the environment. It loops back into the human body. Traditional Chinese Medicine is built on exactly these feedback loops; the five phases correspond not only to the seasons and elements but also to organs, emotions, and sensory openings. The liver belongs to wood, spring, wind, the eyes, and anger. The lungs belong to metal, autumn, dryness, the nose, grief. In this worldview, the external is never simply outside. It is always already moving through us.
My approach here is a deliberate turn toward ancient knowledge when the problem concerns modern infrastructure. It is an act of myth design: the conscious adoption of a non‑Western epistemology as a framework for building new systems. What our networks have excluded is not only environmental rhythm but also an entire way of knowing, one that may be disapproved of by modern scientific reasoning, yet has never accepted the split between nature and culture, the material and the metaphysical.
This is why Elemental Protocols asks: what if the internet kept time not by the atomic clock, but by the polyphony of the living planet?
Joining a lineage of speculative infrastructure projects, I would like to introduce the five elemental protocols: five temporalities, five environmental data streams, five gateways into a different kind of network experience. I name each after a phase from Wuxing. Fire: solar irradiance, the daily solar cycle. Water: tidal height, the lunar rhythm. Wood: wind speed, the shifting breath of the atmosphere. Metal: airborne particulate matter, PM₂.₅, the quality of the air we breathe. Earth: seismic tremors, the constant sub‑magnitude movements beneath our feet.
The project will unfold across multiple layers. The infrastructural layer, to be completed in the future, is the one that most fully embodies the myth. Imagine a custom Wi‑Fi router in your home. It senses these five environmental elements in real time via custom sensors. When the wind exceeds a threshold, the router may open full connectivity. When PM₂.₅ spikes, it may throttle your bandwidth. This router does not simply connect you to the internet. It negotiates between your desire for constant access, the planet's rhythms, and your own bodily reality. It becomes, if you will, a contemporary household deity that turns the domestic network into a site of ritual negotiation with invisible forces.
But today we are not installing routers. Today, we are here to activate the ritual layer. This is a demonstration, a sketch of the idea. I am simulating the five environmental data streams rather than pulling from live APIs. What matters right now is the proposition itself: a collective attunement to rhythms our bodies cannot normally perceive. This layer works through soundwaves, through listening, through the ecology of a collective soundscape that we will create together. We are going to make the insensible sensible so we can hear and feel these temporalities not alone but as a shared acoustic space. This is a ritual for re‑enchanting networked time.
2026.06.06 XY