Handmade Web
I translated A Handmade Web, advocated in 2015 by pioneering net artist J.R. Carpenter, into Korean. That was also the year I founded Min Guhong Manufacturing. In reply to an unexpected email from a Korean who wanted to translate her writing, she wrote:
“That is a wonderful idea. There is one condition, though. I would like the full Korean text to appear only on my website. Anyone who wants to read it in full must visit my website.”
But without asking her permission, and as a secret between you and me, I reproduce it here. That, too, is the nature of the web. Of course, one could also move it over just as it is, like this.
The familiar term “handmade” generally refers to an object made by hand or with simple tools rather than machines. Such an object may be as ordinary or rustic as a clay ashtray, or as meticulously crafted and nearly perfect as a pair of luxury handmade shoes.
I invoke the handmade web to refer to websites coded by hand, line by line, without relying on particular software or services; websites made, maintained, and cared for by individuals rather than corporations; one-of-a-kind websites that challenge existing conventions of reading and writing, editing, design, ownership, privacy, security, identity, and more.
The handmade web flourished for a relatively brief period in the mid-to-late 1990s: after the web, used primarily in academia, became publicly available, but before corporations encroached upon it. Of course, “handmade web” is not the best possible term for defining the web of this period.
In A Vernacular Web (2005), net art pioneer Olia Lialina describes the web of the mid-to-late 1990s:
The web of this period was bright, rich, personal, slow, and always “under construction.” Sudden connections mingled with personal ones. Countless websites were made on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for faster speeds and more powerful computers. […] But this was also a web soon to be undone by dot-com ambitions, professional authoring tools, and guidelines designed by usability experts.
Together with musician Dragan Espenschied, she has continued to explore the web of the mid-to-late 1990s. One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age: Digging through the Geocities Torrent is particularly worth noting.
I invoke the handmade web to connect websites made by hand with independently published printed matter such as magazines, pamphlets, and artists’ books.
In 1995, I released my first net artwork, Fishes and Flying Things. It grew out of existing practices in art and books surrounding content. The text developed from an installation exhibition in which I was participating. I used it to write a circular story and put it in a booklet. When people reach the last page, they close a book and stop reading. That is how books generally work. In the online version, made as a website, however, the last sentence leads back to the first. The story goes around and around. Few physical mementos of the exhibition remain now. There is only one booklet left. The QuarkXPress file from which the booklet can be made is stored on a 44-megabyte SyQuest disk, but it can no longer be opened. The online version, however, still works without difficulty as a handmade web.
The handmade web emerged when offline and online—printed matter and websites—went arm in arm. This symbiosis is clear in the practice of trAce Online Writing Centre, founded at Nottingham Trent University in the UK in 1995. Over its first decade, the centre became one of the world’s most influential online writing communities. Its first publication documenting its activities was a simple booklet made with a word processor and photocopier, containing websites introducing numerous journals and magazines. Its final publication marking ten years was made in a similar way.
trAce Online Writing Centre embraced both media: offline and online, print and the website. In particular, the early chat records shared by its researchers reveal lively discussions about handling and mixing these media in writing. The many original hypertexts and hypermedia made at the centre neatly overlap with the pages of independently published magazines, pamphlets, and artists’ books. —trAces: A Commemoration of Ten Years of Artistic Innovation at trAce, p. 14.
One interesting feature of trAce Online Writing Centre is that it reflects the context in which we produce, distribute, and consume content today. Artifacts displayed in museums, galleries, and libraries are generally works made outside the place of display: manuscripts copied in monasteries, photographs developed in darkrooms. Yet many websites in the centre’s online archive remain within the medium in which they were made—the web—even as the frame through which we view them continues to change at this very moment.
In Media Archaeology: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media (2011), German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst writes: “The moment a radio displayed in a museum is switched on again to find and transmit a current broadcast channel, its status changes from historical artifact to an active producer of sensations and information.” Likewise, when we visit an old website in a current browser, we naturally encounter a temporal paradox. Layers of past web-design aesthetics peel away like wallpaper, revealing earlier versions beneath. Websites optimized for low-resolution monitors occupy less than a third of today’s screen. Ghosts of the past drift through the browser, mixing with autoplaying sound files, page errors, lost hyperlinks, and broken images. Warnings from the past abound, addressed to readers other than us.
American hypermedia writer M. D. Coverley’s The Personalization of Complexity (2001) “explores how personal computers became individualized entities that only their owners could manage.” To experience the work properly requires a particular version of a browser, such as Internet Explorer 4 or 5, or Netscape Navigator 4. Even Netscape Navigator 6 does not support the work’s functionality.
But old websites are not relics of a dead web. They are markers on a map of a web still alive, guiding us through the web of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
I invoke the handmade web to emphasize that we must remain continuously and actively involved not only in making websites, but also in making policies concerning the web.
In The Web We Lost (2012), American entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash writes: “In the web’s early days, there was a widespread expectation that everyone could secure their own identity online by creating, running, and maintaining their own website, rather than depending on a few large sites.”
In February 2015, the online journal QUARTZ published an article with a provocative title: “Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet.” As the article emphasizes, “This is not merely a semantic issue. The expectations and behavior of the next billion people to come online will have an enormous influence on how the internet evolves.”
In October 2014, another online journal, GIZMODO, published an article predicting a great revival of Web 1.0. Its author, American writer Kyle Chayka, wrote:
With the constant noise produced by rapidly growing mainstream social networks, the internet is returning to a quieter, safer, more intimate time. […] It is natural to feel nostalgic for the early web, when everything was smaller, more familiar, more private, and more self-directed.
The self-directed aesthetics and practices of the mid-to-late 1990s web continued in TILDE.CLUB. Running on a single UNIX computer, Tilde Club is a small community and anti-social network of people gathered to make “cool” websites. For some, it is a platform for reconsidering Web 1.0 aesthetics in a contemporary context. Olia Lialina, in particular, defines her space as a gallery and invites visitors to see her net artwork 640×480. For others, however, Tilde Club was a passing fad. Many pages remain empty.
Nevertheless, Web 1.0 aesthetics have never disappeared from the internet. My website, including this page, uses fixed-width <table> tags and was made from a Macromedia HomeSite template in 1997.
Web 1.0 aesthetics also remain intact in the source code of UbuWeb, a vast archival website describing itself as “an independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.” On December 16, 2014, its founder and operator Kenneth Goldsmith boasted on Twitter about UbuWeb: “This fucking website is still coded in HTML 1.0, by hand, line by line, in BBEdit, from a template made in 1996.”
I, too, should put off updating my website until its old-fashioned design no longer looks cool.
I invoke the handmade web to draw attention to the fact that hands are essential to making websites, and that a website can itself function as a manual or handbook.
Until now, web pages have generally been read on desktop or laptop computers. Readers can right-click in a browser, choose “View Page Source,” inspect the code, and copy, paste, edit, and rewrite passages they like. In this way, readers become authors and consumers become producers.
In February 2015, American programmer Matthew Rothberg released Unindexed, a website that continually searches for itself on Google. “This website constantly searches for itself on Google all day long, and the moment it finds itself in the results, it deletes itself completely.” The website survived for twenty-two days before appearing in Google’s results, and then vanished forever. Rothberg subsequently published its source code on GitHub. Anyone, including the reader of this text, can thus make a website that deletes itself the moment it finds itself in Google’s search results.
Meanwhile, many people have rewritten the source code of American poet Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge (2008). For them, it was a thrilling first experience of “generating” text with a computer.
I have rewritten Taroko Gorge three times. The first result, Gorge (2010), constantly emits computer-generated poetic paradoxes about food, consumption, decadence, and desire. Alongside the close relationship between the handmade web and print, I included excerpts of Gorge’s output and source code in GENERATION[S] (2010). The book now remains only as a PDF.
I invoke the handmade web to draw attention to the body—to physicality.
Consider the work performed by the hand in British artist Daniel Eatock’s One Mile Scroll (2008). Places such as Denver, the Mile High City, and a grandfather’s grave appear at the top of the screen. To see other places, users must keep moving their fingers, scrolling and scrolling. The work operates entirely through the hand, turning the length of virtual space within a browser into an actual physical distance.
Paradoxically, hand-held devices such as smartphones and tablets, which we use while holding them, have taken us further from the handmade web. In Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (2014), Lori Emerson, founder of the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL), writes: “The iPad works because its users cannot know how it works.” In the browsers on iPhones, iPads, and similar mobile devices, users cannot inspect the source code of the websites they view. The iPad is useful for easily accessing content made by others, but it is not easy to use as a tool for producing new content.
I invoke the handmade web to propose slowness and smallness as another form of resistance to today’s web.
Today, the web moves toward commercialization, accompanied by multinational corporations, proprietary applications, read-only devices, search-engine algorithms, content management systems (CMS), WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, digital publishers, and more. At such a moment, recognizing work with computer languages—coding—as self-directed writing, and using it to make, manage, and maintain one’s own website as an online work or publication, is suddenly becoming a radical act.
Today’s web is becoming a proprietary, predatory, obscene space. All the more reason for me to devote myself to using it more poetically and uncompromisingly.