annet dekker capturing online cultures and storytelling as a method
Due to less privacy-friendly settings in Facebook, Ulman felt reluctant to record
those statements: "No one really knew I was performing It would be really
complicated to archive that and keep the privacy of people".19 The decision to record
only the actual performance and not all the discussion around it is understandable
from a privacy point of view; however, an important part of the work - her
comments on the conventions on many social media platforms - can foremost be
found on Facebook, but is likely to be lost soon.
'Amateur' examples
Stromajer documented the context of his project as best as he could by
making screenshots and copying the comments that were made on his process; these
can now be found on his own website. With initiatives like Webrecorder anyone can
now document all kinds of (privacy-sensitive) data. Potentially this could serve as a
way to capture the context of online projects as well as the performance, which
means a broader and more 'democratic' view on art history.
In the past several attempts were made to capture the context of how users
experience the Web. For instance, the NetArtDatabase project, initiated by Robert
Sakrowski and Constant Dullaart, aims to move beyond the technical specifications
and the interaction model of the artwork. They try to capture the reception of net art
in the environment where it was originally perceived. As Sakrowski explains, "the
context, the private atmosphere, and the hardware interaction defines a large part of
the 'net art activity'."21 The project makes clear that documentation needs to move
beyond a single method of photography or video and that one should focus on
various points of view to illustrate what net art is. Although attention is given to the
'natural' environment where one interacts with net art, the formal requirements for
the set up are very static, leaving little room to manoeuvre.
Capturing net art activity also takes place in other ways, for example, in the project
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2011-ongoing) by Olia Lialina and Dragan
Espenschied. With this project Lialina and Espenschied take up the challenge of
finding new archival methods that reflect the way archival content was created: the
captured universe of Geocities. Geocities was a free Web hosting service founded in
July 1995. It soon emerged as one of the most popular and inhabited places on the
Web and remained so until the late 1990s. At the peak of the dot.com fever in
January 1999 Yahoo! purchased Geocities for 3 billion dollars. However, Geocities
soon became synonymous with old-fashioned aesthetics and basic bad taste. At the
same time people drifted to social network profiles. In April 2009, Yahoo!
announced that it would shut down Geocities in six months. During these months
the Archive Team, with the help of about 100 people, managed to rescue almost a
terabyte of Geocities pages. And on 26 October 2010, marking the first anniversary
of Geocities' closing, the Archive Team released a torrent file archive of 641 GB,
containing approximately 1.2 million accounts. As mentioned by digital archivist
Jason Scott:
"Geocities arrived in roughly 1995, and was, for hundreds of thousands of
people, their first experience with the idea of a webpage, of a full-colour,
completely controlled presentation on anything they wanted. For some people,
their potential audience was greater for them than for anyone in the entire
history of their genetic line. It was, to these people, breathtaking."22
As a symbol of the 'amateur' Web, Geocities is a trace of how the Web was used at
the time. This was one of the main reasons why on 1 November 2010 Lialina and
Espenschied bought a 2-TB disk and began downloading the largest bittorrent file
of all time.23 They started unzipping the first files in January 2011, a process that
ended in March 2011. After downloading, storing and sorting the 16,000 archived
Geocities sites, which took another year, they started redistributing screen captures
of the Geocities homepages through the Web. As Espenschied remarks:
hoofdstuk 3
G Niet beveiligd 1 webenact.rhizome.org/excellences-and-perfections/20141014150552/http://instagram.com/amaliaulman
iKtóttupm
amaliaulman -
Amalia's Instagram Los Angeles
I learn mostly from books and movies^?
j£}eating, blogging, shopping sleeping
Figure 2. Screencapture Amalia Ulman's Excellences Perfections, captured by Webrecorder20
19 Vindu Goel, 'A Dynamic New Tool to Preserve the Friendsters of the Future', in: The New York Times
(2014, 19 October) https://bits.blogs.nytimes.
com/2014/10/19/a-new-tool-to-preserve-moments-on-the-internet/?_r=0, last accessed 13/10/2018.
20 http://webenact.rhizome.org/excellences-and-perfections/201410141505 52/http://instagram.com/
amaliaulman.
146
21 Kimberley Spreeuwenberg ed., Documenting internet-based Art. The Dullaart-Sakrowski Method.
Culture Vortex. Public Participation in Online Collections (2011) p. 4 http://aaaan.net/wp-content/
uploads/2015/09/Documenting-Internet-Based-Art_FINAL.pdf, last accessed 13/10/2018.
22 See, http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2720, last accessed 13/10/2018.
23 For more information about their research and findings, see Olia Lialina, 'Still There. Ruins and Templates
of Geocities', in: Annet Dekker ed. Lost and Living (in) Archives (Amsterdam, Valiz, 2017) pp. 193-210.
147
