Loose Thoughts On âDigital Archaeologyâ and the Potential Immortality of our Online Web Presences
I grew up online - I spent a lot of my early childhood hovering over my dadâs shoulder as he worked on the computer. I was about 6 when I was first given a desktop PC of my own, where I primarily played coloring games like Crayola Art Studio, simple platformers like id Softwareâs Commander Keen or Moonlite Softwareâs Hocus Pocus, and adventure games like Sierra On-Lineâs Torinâs Passage or Kingâs Quest VI.* And I spent much of my early adolescence online, chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, writing in my Diaryland journal, and reading comments on MySpace.Â
Being at the computer, and expressing myself online, was very formative for me growing up. And over the past several days, Iâve been trying to track down and piece together my early web activity.Â
As accounts have sat unused and become deactivated, or companies have merged or websites have gone offline, much of that information is lost to me. I canât remember many of the usernames or passwords or even the old emails I used to set up my earliest accounts. But I do remember enough. Today I downloaded all of the journal entries I had posted to Myspace between 2005 and 2008 when, as a college freshman, I last posted to the site. I downloaded all of the images still hosted on my two Photobucket accounts, where the layout images for my old Livejourrnal were still live. Iâm working to reactive and somehow archive my Diaryland journal, where I wrote poetry and shared so much of my life during middle school and early high school. And much of this has been very akin to an archaeology of sorts. Thereâs been a good amount of digging; requesting new passwords to old email addresses that I, in turn, had to request the password to as well. Iâm surprised how much is still online and accessible after so long -- some of these accounts Iâve had for over 15 Â years!
And whatâs interesting about this is that I canât help but think of an essay I finished in 2012 as part of my grad school applications, where I wrote on the role of YouTube as archive and reflected on the work of Cuban-American artist Jillian Mayer as someone who has explored Youtube as a medium of sorts.
One of the works I wrote about was her viral video I Am Your Grandma, posted to YouTube in 2011, which currently has over 3 million views.
In a vlog-turned-music video addressing her future, unborn grandchildren, Mayer introduces herself as a number of macabre characters, singing along to a dance track and repeating the hook âI am your grandmaâ throughout the one-minute video. Reflecting on Youtubeâs ability to serve as archive, I wrote:
But the video is really a testament to the potential archival longevity of digital artifacts and spaces. Returning to the idea of lineage, the online presence of individuals who participate in social media will be preserved so long as those servers remain online. Will Facebook, for example, give way to a digital graveyard fifty or a hundred years from now? Mayer has commented that she â[wouldnât] mind the idea of living forever in social media platforms,â noting that much of her own work might even necessitate this kind of preservation. And digital artifacts can remain lossless, infinitely maintaining their data and integrity. Where the physical body will age, die, decay and be forgotten, the virtual body can continue living idly in data servers and hard drives.
Will the Internet of today abut or overlap the Internet of a hundred years from now? Will future archaeologists mine our old status updates and Tweets to paint a picture of life today, much like scouring through the artifacts of ancient civilizations? The fact that so much of our activity is recorded, preserved in photos, videos, comments, provides us with so much information that we normally wouldnât think to record: a picture of a shirt your friend just bought, texts confirming dinner plans, email forwards from coworkers. So much throw-away material that pieces together and informs on the everyday, something we donât necessary have when looking towards the past. I think of how little I know about my own great- or great-great-grandparents, and realize this might not be the case for our own descendants. Our angry YouTube comments or Instagram posts might live on for our future, unborn grandchildren to see. Â
* You can play any of the listed games through the Internet Archive DOS emulator accessible in the posted links.Â
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Known for a spectacular and chaotic visual language that combines and reconstitutes sculpture and film into works that invent new cultures, customs, and histories, in 2002 John Bock cast his absurdist lens on boxing, overlapping violence with comedy in the video Boxer. Costumed in clownish ensembles and puffed up appendages stuffed with food, Bock and an opponent throw punches and create a peculiar and humorous spectacle from the sport. As the video unfolds across two minutes, the fighting gestures and movements grow increasingly violent, and the two costumed figures begin to come undone, collapsing, unraveling, and spilling cauliflower onto the ring and splattering red cabbage across walls; the unlikely viscera of uproarious and carnivalesque bodies.
Marina AbramoviÄ has, for over 30 years, treated her body as the primary material of her work, adapting herself to extreme circumstances, rulesets, and behaviors that ritualize everyday life and test the boundaries of physical and mental endurance. In 2002, responding to the cultural trauma reflected across New York City in the aftermath of September 11, AbramoviÄ seized upon the need to heal and used her body as a cathartic engine for spiritual and mental cleansing in the performance The House with Ocean View. For twelve days, the artist lived on three open platforms lofted five feet above the groundâone with a toilet and shower, another with a table and chair, and the last with a wooden bedâwithout speaking or eating, in full view of an audience that she, in turn, confronted with her presence. Each living space was outfitted with a ladder of upturned blades, creating the illusion of possible escape. The performance was a subtle yet powerful exercise in asceticism, transparency, and meditation, stripping away the world and honing in on the simple moments and gestures we all share.
Responding to the modes and means through which digital communication has transformed our expressions both online and in the world, Performa 15 inaugurates Performa Digital, an initiative that highlights and organizes projects that consider social media and the Internet as platforms for performance. As a medium so marked by embodiment and physical movement, the mediation performance undergoes when translated through digital spaces raises important questions about the very nature of performance, our connections and detachments from one another, and what it means to be present.
For this first project, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera takes over Performaâs Instagram, exploring the reinvigorated voice activism has found online in light of movements like the Arab Spring and #BlackLivesMatter.
Responding to the invigorated voice activism has found online, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (@TaniaBruguera) employs Instagram as an activist platform, exploring the connections between art, activism, and political change, and how social media bridges gaps in communication and catalyzes radical thought.
For Performaâs first Digital Commission, Bruguera engages followers as online citizens with the hashtag #InstaCitizen, using as her medium the Internet's emergent role as civic arena and the immediacy with which information travels between nodes on a network; user to user, and platform to platform. Mobilizing collective responsibility, the artist engages individual participation within these global and online spaces, lending anyone a stage and a voice to share their experiences endlessly, widely, and informally. Fueling unexpected actions and interactions where the boundaries between performer and audience are blurred by the open and rhizomatic nature of the platform, Bruguera's performance spans across social media, bridging conversations between Instagram and Twitter to implicate an ever-wider audience within image- and text-based actions. With an assigned date, time, and duration, Brugueraâs performance is firmly situated in the real and the live, where a seated audience at the Performa Hub watches her interact digitally and further shifts expectations of what it means to perform online.
Bruguera invites both her audience and social media followers to post personal moments of self-censorship regarding their gender, ethnicity, immigration status, and race, trusting them to keep the project socially-minded, political, and free from personal attacks. These contributors are encouraged to tag their responses @TaniaBruguera in addition to the hashtag #instacitizen, entering into direct dialogue with the artist, fellow contributors, and the audience online. The artist, as well, invites users to log into her own account to post these stories and thoughts, trusting her followers with her private data and transforming herself into a social platform for dialogue and exchange.
username: @TaniaBruguera    password*: instacitizen3
Following the live performance, the project continues to live beyond Brugueraâs initial instigation, allowing her followers to serve as their own agitators of online activism, creating a wide-reaching and self-propelled platform towards social change.
* The password of the account will be changing following numeric order as Instagram attempts to shut it down during this project, allowing us to work just one step ahead of their censorship. If 'instacitizen3' doesn't work, try 'instacitizen4' and so on! The password will always updated be here and in the account's description.
