Final Project
For our final project you will be creating a piece of Internet art informed by the various online cultures we've explored and concepts we've discussed throughout the quarter, specifically: net.art, CSS art, digital gardens, digital folklore (Lialina, Espenschied) and the notion of the Internet itself as art (Heffernan). To receive full credit for the final project, your piece must:
- be hand crafted (coded in HTML and CSS)
- accessible by anyone with an Internet connection (ie. hosted online)
- demonstrate the possibility for future "cultivation" (ie. digital gardening)
- aim to evoke (your own interpretation of) Heffernan's notion of "magic and loss"
GeoCities might be dead, but its spirit is still very much alive in various corners of the Internet, for example, read about Digital gardens (pdf version), "side projects" produced by web designers and developers who create "individualized, creative sites that eschew the one-size-fits-all look and feel of social media". In his 2009 essay on Internet surf clubs, Commodify Your Consumption: Tactical Surfing / Wakes of Resistance (optional reading), Curt Cloninger argues that from the artist's perspective...
The danger of MySpace and YouTube is not the threat that they may wind up archiving and owning all the 'content' I produce, or that they are currently getting rich off the content I produce, but that they control the parameters within which I produce 'my original' content.
Curt Cloninger (2009)
The early web is an example of what the Internet looked like when 'the parameters' within which netizens produced their web sites were fairly open and unopinionated, before the era of social media, where a handful of surveillance capitalist platforms replaced the blank canvas of a geocities pages with the restricted parameters of online profiles. What would a contemporary online presence look like if it were unrestricted by these parameters?
What is the difference between a "homepage" and an online "profile"? Consider the digital folklore inspired personal homepages of net artist's Petra Cotright and Marisa Olson; or the the brutalist style of artist and musician Bill Wrutz's homepage; or the minimalist approach indie game artist Paolo Pedercini's took with his homepage; Or the animated design vibes of CSS artist's homepages like Shunya Koide and Agathe Cocco.
The "digital gardens" discussed in the MIT Technology Review article is another answer to that question. Like web designer Melanie Richards' pages for example, Highlights a digital home for all the time's she highlights text in a book she's reading, or Melanie’s Bucket List a collection of places she has/has-yet to visit, or Good Things "a personal compilation of good sensory things in life." Other examples of digital gardens not mentioned in the article are Jake Is Listening, a collection of tracks creative coder Jake Albaugh is currently listening to, or Jake Quits a site where Jake publicly keeps track of how long it's been since he quit smoking, a public reminder he created to keep himself accountable.
In her performative lecture for the Transmediale festival, net artist Olia Lialina makes a distinctions between "Me vs My". In the Web's early days fandoms tended to dominate the Web rings, homepages used to be focused on our interests (My), rather than our selves (Me). If you chose one of your interests to create a digital home for, what would that be? Computer pioneer Ted Nelson coined lots of new words besides "hypertext" and "hypermedia" to convey his visions, Mike Dank is a fan of Nelson's and keeps a digital garden of #NelsonWords (side note: Ted Nelson's site is also worth checking out, he's spoken out against CSS in the past, his homepage's design reflects this position). Or maybe your fandom is more of a love/hate relationship, like Cody Ogden's Killed by Google, a digital graveyard for all the various tools/services Google released then abandoned or "sunset". Or maybe your digital garden collects something a bit more esoteric like Matthew Rayfield's stl.garden collection of publicly shared 3D (stl) files publicly on GitHub or Cory Arcangel's classic net art piece Data Diaries.
Or maybe you have a completely different vision for how you might leverage the browser as a blank canvas for self expression, inspired by the art works we've discussed this quarter like those of the early net.art scene (see Rhizome's Net Art Anthology for more) or the contemporary code sketches of the CSS Art scene (see my collection of CSS Art).
Publishing (Hosting) our Work
In order to "publish" our works to the Web, we need to upload our code to a "host", a computer connected to the Internet running a web server. In theory you can run your own web server from home, but you would need to make sure that computer is always on and always connected to the Internet (not to mention setting up a firewall, manage DNS and other details), because if that computer was ever shut off, then your website wouldn't be reachable. This is why there exist all sorts of companies and services for hosting your web projects for you. There are different sorts of hosts that offer different sorts of computers, servers and services (depending on your needs) which come with varying price-tags ranging from a few bucks a month to hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. Because our projects are relatively simple (front-end "static" web sites) we'll be taking advantage of GitHub's free web hosting. Before diving into either of the tutorials below, make sure to create a free GitHub account, and if you're new to GitHub consider signing up for their student developer pack which comes with all sorts of freebies.
In this video I explain how to use netnet to share sketches as well as how to link netnet with your GitHub account in order to create and host projects to your GitHub account. (NOTE: in the video i mention that the shortcut key to open the search bar is "control + comma or command + comma on Mac", but what i mean to say was "control + quote" or "command + quote" on Mac)
BONUS: Doing Things Locally (a crash course)
If you're interested to see what it looks like to create work "locally" (meaning on your computer rather than online via netnet) and what a basic web development environment and workflow looks like, Here's an Internet Art "Crash Course" I put together that runs through the entire process. In this set of videos I cover the basics of HTML, CSS and tease a little bit of JavaScript. I'll also demonstrate how to manage files, how to use the Atom code editor, how to use browser developer tools and how to publish work to the web by using GitHub's free web hosting.