Subnet masks can be used to determine which of the 4.3 billion possible public IPv4 addresses for the internet can be used by a given network. These mask out which bits (binary digits) of an address can not be changed; a mask of 255.255.255.240 or 11111111.11111111.11111111.11110000 allows the last four bits of IP addresses within its network to be changed; in a network starting with 52.72.63, this mask would produce an IP range comprising 16 addresses from 52.72.68.240 to 52.72.68.255. In the early days of the internet, different sized networks within the internet were classified: class A networks were given subnet mask 255.0.0.0, class B networks 255.255.0.0 and class C networks 255.255.255.0. These network classes comprised 16.8 million, 65.5 thousand and 256 addresses respectively. The router on which this is hosted uses a private class C network, allowing you and another ~254 hosts to connect.
This work draws on Christopher Vitale’s Networkologies, in its treatment of mutually constitutive networks of different scales and on different substrates. It is situated on a small-scale local network produced by a low-power embedded device and diagrams a dense cluster near the centre of the international art world as inscribed into the planetary scale cloud infrastructure used by Instagram. The network of 256 nodes and 4,291 edges have been extracted from 96,083 nodes (accounts) and 18,6059 (follows) edges of publicly available data gathered from Instagram in late 2019. The 256 nodes were selected based on their high centrality, or connectedness, within the larger network.
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