In my column Ouvir Imagens on Rádio USP this Monday, March 12, I discussed technological obsolescence and its impact on the memory of net art.
They say the Internet never forgets. But planned obsolescence and the information architecture of networks prevent us from remembering.
On one hand, software and programming languages stop working. Who remembers those old VRML websites with their 3D environments that enchanted the Internet in the 1990s? On the other, algorithms such as Google’s and Facebook’s decide what we will see, anticipating our searches and organizing our timelines.
Between problems ranging from corporate bankruptcies to increasingly strict new security standards, the fact is that accessing older websites is very difficult, especially art websites, which are deeply shaped by experimental practices.
For this reason, the history of net art, art created for the Internet and perhaps the youngest of the arts, is being erased before it has even begun to be written.
Major museums, including New York’s MoMA, Britain’s Tate, and Brazil’s MAC-USP, have been discussing the issue, while international research centers are beginning to develop tools to recover the memory not just of online art but of the Internet as a whole.
Among the most successful projects are the Wayback Machine and Webrecorder. The Wayback Machine is a search tool that allows users to browse earlier versions of a website, provided the files have not been deleted from the servers.
The sophisticated Webrecorder is a recorder; it does not recover anything. It is designed to prevent future loss by saving pages’ dynamic structure and metadata.
Important as they are for research, these tools do not restore access to the vast number of websites that have been blocked, lost on defunct servers, or simply built with technologies that have stopped working. For now, we still face a paradox: the worst place to access the history of net art is the Internet itself.
Find out more:
Wayback Machine: http://archive.org/web/
Webrecorder: https://webrecorder.io/
Listen to this column: