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A Vernacular Web

Olia Lialina appreciates the patchwork amateur aesthetics of the early web and calls for an exploration of the cultural history of cyberspace. [Link]

In the past few years I’ve also been making work that foregrounds this disappearing aesthetic of the past. With these works I want to apologize for my arrogance in the early years and to preserve the beauty of the vernacular web by integrating them within contemporary art pieces. But this is only half of the job.

Creating collections and archives of all the midi files and animated gifs will preserve them for the future but it is no less important to ask questions. What did these visual, acoustic and navigation elements stand for? For which cultures and media did these serve as a bridge to the web? What ambitions were they serving? What problems did they solve and what problems did they create? Let me talk about the difficult destiny of some of these elements.

jon posted this at 9:34 AM
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