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1. A Handmade Web

   I made my first web-based art work in 1995. It’s still online, it still works. The internet has changed a lot since then, but the DIY aesthetics and practices of that era have by no means disappeared. In today’s highly commercialised web of proprietary applications, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers, it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects. Drawing upon Olia Lialina’s essay “A Vernacular Web” (2010), this paper makes correlations between the early ‘amateur’ web and today’s maker and open source movements. Examples of the persistence of Web 1.0 are presented, from the massive Ubu Web site which its founder boasts, ‘is still hand-coded in html 1.0 in bbedit, from templates made in 1996,’ to the tiny anti-social network TILDE.CLUB, where small experimental websites are hosted on one ‘totally standard unix computer.’ In addition to the slow writing of the web through hand coding, the practice of appropriating existing source code is discussed in relation to Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge (2008), which has been remixed dozens of times.

   J. R. Carpenter - 10.05.2015 - 12:21

2. A Vernacular Web

   An extended and illustrated version of a talk at the Decade of Web Design Conference in Amsterdam, January 2005

   When I started to work on the World Wide Web I made a few nice things that were special, different and fresh. They were very different from what was on the web in the mid 90's.

   I'll start with a statement like this, not to show off my contribution, but in order to stress that -- although I consider myself to be an early adopter -- I came late enough to enjoy and prosper from the "benefits of civilization". There was a pre-existing environment; a structural, visual and acoustic culture you could play around with, a culture you could break. There was a world of options and one of the options was to be different.

   So what was this culture? What do we mean by the web of the mid 90's and when did it end?

   J. R. Carpenter - 10.05.2015 - 12:32