The Chair of Contemporary Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, held by Hito Steyerl, required a publication platform to publish essays, conference recordings, podcasts, announcements and other content related to its subject area. The magazine collects critical articles on topics at the intersection of art and digital media, especially artificial intelligence, and is open to selected contributors from the field. The inclusive nature of the collection is also expressed in the title ‘Carrier Bag’ and the corresponding logo, which is based on the term coined by Ursula K. Le Guin.

More of an academic publication medium than a blog, Carrier Bag was equipped with some rather unusual features. On the one hand, the margin column is used for comments, literature references and inserts, while on the other hand, integrations for common citation managers were provided. In addition, the customer's request for cross-linking of content was met by replacing the usual principle of tags and categories with a system of concepts that allows a remix of various contributions to be graphically traced as a path along exemplary paragraphs and illustrations. These paths, which readers can explore in a playful manner, can also be shared via links.

Video and audio players as well as several other content formats were also integrated. A user authorisation system was implemented to open up the website to different user groups – administrators, editors and contributors.

Carrier Bag was later supplemented by the specially created HalluciGen plugin, published as open source, which aims to present unauthorised AI crawlers with nonsense content instead of the actual content, so that they cannot be used to train chatbots and other AI applications.