I made my first web-based work in 1995. The impetus for Fishes & Flying Things came from the material practices of fine art and book-making. The text evolved from an installation art exhibition I had on at the time. From this text, I created a small book-work which was meant to tell a circular story but when people got to the end they stopped reading because that’s the way books work. In the web version, the last page linked to the first; the story circled round and round. Of the installation, no physical evidence remains. Of the book-work, only one copy. The QuarkExpress file is stored on a 44 MB SyQuest cartridge which I still own, but the contents of which I can no longer access. The handmade website, on the other hand, is still online and it still works.

The handmade web emerged at a time when print and digital enjoyed a more symbiotic relationship. This is evident in the early output of the trAce Online Writing Centre  founded at Nottingham Trent University in 1995. Over the next decade trAce evolved into one of the most influential online writing communities in the world. trAce’s first output was aword-processed photocopied booklet which contained links to websites distributing journals and zines. Fittingly, trAce’s last output was also a print booklet, in which it is stated:

The trAce community embraced both camps, and some early chatlogs contain lively discussions about the use of mixed media in writing… The creative hypertexts and hypermedia in the trAce Archive can easily be compared to the multifarious pages of an artist’s book. (PDF trAces: A Commemoration of Ten Years of Artistic Innovation at trAce, page 14) One of the many interesting things about the online archive of the trAce Online Writing Centre is how much it reflects the context of the creation and dissemination of its contents. Whereas archives held in museums or libraries generally contain artifacts created elsewhere — manuscripts illuminated in a monastery, for example, or photographs developed in a darkroom — the handmade web pages contained in this online archive continue to exist in the medium within which they were created. That said, the frames through which we view them continue to change.

In “Media Archaeology: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media” (2011) Wolfgang Ernst observes:

If a radio from a museum collection is reactivated to play broadcast channels of the present, it changes its status: it is not a historical object anymore but actively generates sensual and informational presence. Similarly, when viewing old web pages in modern browsers we are confronted with a temporal paradox. Layer upon layer of dated web-design aesthetics overlap and peel like wallpaper, revealing earlier versions beneath. Pages optimised for lower resolutions now take less than a third of the screen. Ghosts of browsers past mingle with occasional page errors, dead links, and missing images. Sound files play automatically. Warnings abound, issued from earlier eras, addressed to readers who are not us.

For example, M.D. Coverley’s The Personalization of Complexity(2001) “explores the ways in which each of our personal computers have become idiosyncratic, individualized entities, only sometimes manageable by the owners.” Fittingly, the piece itself warns that it is viewable only on Level 4 and 5 Microsoft Internet Explorer and Level 4 Netscape. Netscape 6 will not support many of the features in this essay.

These are not artifacts of a dead web but rather, signposts on a map of a living web pointing to a web as it once was, a web in progress, a web in the making.