CultureBlocs

CultureBlocs is a small system for noticing and keeping cultural experiences. At its heart is a pocket totem — firmware on an ESP32-S3 (M5Stack StickS3) — that mints memory beads: tiny timestamped records of moments at galleries, gigs, screenings and festivals. When two totems meet, they can mint a mutual encounter bead, a shared marker that you were both there.

Back home, CultureBloc Studio pulls beads off the device over Web Serial, where you can name the occasion, annotate, and choose what to keep. Kept beads become lexicon-valid records in the Spine — a lightweight federated data service (FastAPI/SQLite) using ATProto-shaped com.cultureblocs.* schemas, so records are federation-ready from day one.

Beads group into strands — a day out, an evening, an exhibition visit — and selected strands are published to this site. Selection is the consent act: anything not in an exported strand stays private, and the public export strips location coordinates and device provenance. You can see the latest published strand on the home page.

Stack: ESP32-S3 firmware, Web Serial, FastAPI, SQLite, ATProto lexicons, Docker Compose, a web component for static-site embedding.