“we expect digital space to archive everything even after we delete it”
“and we keep forgetting to preserve things because it’s just there every day and why would anyone want to remember last week’s internet – and we don’t but we want to remember the fifteen-years-ago internet and that was last week’s internet, once”
-Calvin Kasulke, Several People Are Typing
There’s so much information available to us in the modern world—we live in the information age, and this deluge of data is courtesy of the Internet. Anyone with a computer and connection has pretty much the whole sum of non-classified human knowledge at their fingertips.
We now take the Internet for granted; so much of the data we’ve created and remembered is expected to be there, even though it’s often not, and humanity is losing access to old art and history that enriches our lives. The statement that ‘the Internet lasts forever’ isn’t a given; Older physical storage mediums like magnetic tape or older CDs degrade or mold in storage, hard drives can wipe themselves if you drop them wrong, and cloud-stored or website-hosted data is at the mercy of whoever controls those servers, often ruled by others’ opinions on what ‘belongs’ on the Internet.
In attempting to convey these ideas visually, I struck upon the imagery of GeoCities. GeoCities was a web directory started on the early web in 1994, acquired by Yahoo in 1999, and lasted until it was shut down in 2009. The website-hosting service allowed a user to create a personal webpage, completely self-written and designed, originally linked to in ‘neighborhoods’—areas of GeoCities named for real cities and devoted to a topic to link similar sites. It is a prime example of the user-driven early web connections with infinite personalize-ability, with most pages being deeply personal family photo archives, or pages about local groups or passions, almost the opposite of today’s social media designed for marketability. All of which you may know, if you’ve found this page.
When the Geocities site was shut down in 2009, over 38 million people no longer had these sites to work on and edit and show to others. The Internet Archive, a giant in the field of data preservation on the internet as well as free digital library, scrambled to save as much of the site as it could at the time. Years later, it released this data in a torrent file, and the blog One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age seeks to bring images from this torrent into the feeds of other internet users and remind them about the existence of Geocities. I drew upon the repository of screenshots on this blog to create my art.
These images were selected by picking those which seemed interesting and personal. I then modified these images by means of databending, a process by which the raw data of an image file is modified using audio editing software, to introduce the visual suggestion of corruption and loss of data in visually interesting ways and provoke thought about the hidden impermanency of any digital media.
I chose to upload the images of my art to a Neocities website partially to help people view it in the future, as well as a symbolic way of helping it to come full circle; under the new Internet environment, increasingly corporate-controlled, movements to restore older aspects of the internet are making resurgences, one of which being the creation of Neocities as a replacement for the old defunct Geocities. An art form that is purely digital and comments on the digital world should be hosted on the Internet—and no worries, it’s backed up! On my personal drives and the Wayback Machine, courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Some questions for you, the viewer, to consider: What do you have on the Internet that you’d be upset to lose—and where is it? Not just on the Web itself, but in the real world, physically? Who controls your access to it? What steps can you take to protect that data and the memories attached to it? What other data can you preserve in passing beyond what you personally generated—and how?
This art installation was shown on April 9, 2022 at an event called ModgePodge hosted by other Belmont Honors '23 students. For the full collection of finished pieces, see the link "Image Gallery" below.
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©2022