You scroll up and down quickly, making the page move faster than the content it holds.
THE SYSADMIN:
This “building” of a blog style website it is almost willfully inefficient. Especially the way you are doing it. Your code is sloppy. You have tried to short-cut using containers, templates and styles which are only now understood after days, weeks of simply interfacing with something you perhaps have not in some time. In that sense, it has also been time-inefficient.
You think to yourself, good. You have pseudo-systematically developed an archive, a digital palimpsest of your concerns, work, research and art where they can be navigated, linked and experienced together in a network of loosely organised files, interactively and intimately. It refuses the feed. It resists the algorithmic promise of clarity, reach or optimisation. It is open access to your consciousness, but there remains a distorted or manipulated vision of yourself, your online avatar(s). The site becomes less a portfolio and more a mind left open in a browser tab.
The early internet wasn’t smooth, but it was full of promise.
THE PANOPTICON:
It didn’t want you.
THE SYSADMIN:
It didn’t optimise for you.
THE FAUX-SAVANT:
It asked you to wait, to click, to get lost, to misunderstand. Pages would break and links would die. Fonts rendered wrong.
Images of naked people loaded top-to-bottom, absolutely not instantaneously, like a small performance of patience and desire. Meaning accumulated slowly, through friction.
THE FAUX SAVANT:
This is where early net art can feel relevant, particularly practices like JODI, whose work treated the browser not as a neutral container but as an unstable performer. HTML, JavaScript, CSS weren’t invisible infrastructure; they were material. Errors were gestures. A misbehaving, whimsical page. People just figured it out.
This website doesn’t seem to aim to be preserved cleanly. You consider that changeability is not a bug but a core property. The medium is the message, in a nod to Marshall McLuhan, internet-based works are never self-contained.
THE WITNESS:
They rely on, need those external systems created by potentially ill-meaning, greedy and duplicitous human hosts. Evil landlords are not exclusive to the physical world. Browsers, databases, file formats, servers that are already decaying. A work that pulls from Flickr, or depends on JavaScript behaving a certain way, is structurally unstable.
The research question “how do we conserve this?” starts to uncover that the instability is the work. The resistance, or at least reluctance, to systems and tools required to exist. You just remembered not to take your dog down to the beach today, because the local water company has been offloading sewage into the sea, if you didn’t need water, you could refuse to pay them until they improve their water treatment and disposal standards. You could also not have any water, become a filthy, impoverished, dehydrated husk for a week or so until you eventually die. That would show them.
THE BIT:
Fucking Florence Shitingale. Poor Mr Tickel, maybe he’s mentally sick-el.
To write, think, and publish this way is to accept that the fruits of your labour may not function “correctly” in fifteen years. Fonts might change, disappear even. CSS will break. JavaScript will fail silently. Links will rot. Images will compress differently. The average resolution will shift. WordPress will probably be owned by another web-hosting service which will only offer its web-builder as a subscription service. Even the idea of a “browser” will mutate. The work will not survive intact, but it may survive as a trace, a corrupted artefact, a partially executable thought. That temporal and ephemeral fragility mirrors contemporary consciousness more honestly than a polished platform ever could, not that you could ever articulate that.
Where early internet pages felt more like a teenager’s bedroom than corporate billboards, today’s internet feels like and very much is managed infrastructure; owned and sublet. “Success” requires you to create something legible, search-engine-optimisational and monetisable. You will require five different consultant-title drones to really make a website under late-stage capitalism, and you won’t actually own it under technofeudalism.
Building your own website now; hand-linked, internally recursive, inefficient – is a quiet refusal of that logic. It’s an insistence on opacity, on layered meaning, on writing that doesn’t collapse into summary but can be an organism which continues to grow underground/online as it takes in more nutrient rich open-access source material. A reflective derive through your psychogeography.