Digital Folklore
At the same time that (the comparatively small group of) net.artists were creating their iconic works of Internet art, the rest of the web was also being (predominantly) created by amateurs known as "netizens": the non-professional, curious and creative users of the early web. Though they "made fun" of these "amateurs" at the time, today net.artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied find immense value in this early web and work to preserve it. Watch this video by Quartz where Lialina and Espenschied discuss their motivation behind this work, and then read the first 35 pages of their book Digital Folklore. While they clearly find the (now retro) aesthetic interesting, their investment in this era of the Internet is about much more. Why do they think it's important to preserve these sites? What do they feel has been lost in our present era of Squarespace and Instagram?
After watching the video and completing the reading, Do the following HTML/CSS tutorials:
- Digital Folklore: part 1 (HTML) interactive version | video version
- Digital Folklore: part 2 (CSS) interactive version | video version
- Digital Folklore: part 3 (CSS) interactive version | video version
- Digital Folklore: part 4 (CSS) interactive version | video version