Digital Archaeology (exhibition)
Digital Archaeology, unveiled in London as part of Internet Week Europe 2010, was described as 'the first ever archaeological dig of the Internet'. The event showcased a selection of groundbreaking websites from the early days of the web, congruously displayed on the hardware and software they were designed on and for.
History
The exhibition, organised by , made its debut at 2010. The show celebrates the golden era of the website but more importantly, it seeks to document the formative years of digital culture and raise the profile of web archiving.The debut exhibition showcased 15 groundbreaking websites and featured a keynote presentation by Helen Hockx-Yu, Web Archiving Programme Manager at The British Library. Such was the level of interest, Boulton was invited to run it again at 2011 in an expanded format, where it attracted 12,000 visitors. The New York show was sponsored by Google and featured a keynote presentation by Abigail Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress. The event was held again, in a reduced form, as part of 2013, where it was visited by the team at CERN responsible for restoring the first website.
Curator said of the importance of the event "Today, when almost a quarter of the earth's population is online, this artistic, commercial and social history is being wiped from the face of the earth. Unless we act now to archive our recent digital past, we are in real danger of losing the building blocks of the web that have so shaped modern culture."
Digital Archaeology featured as a key part of a larger exhibition, called debuting at The Barbican in 2014 and now at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm.
Featured websites
The Project - 1991
The Project was the first website to connect and share documents on personal computers via the internet. It was published by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1991 and used HTML 1.0. Its first web address was https://web.archive.org/web/20150717103715/http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which described the WorldWideWeb project.No screenshots were kept of the very first website. The website featured at Digital Archaeology is believed to be the earliest available copy, from 1992.
Antirom - 1994
The Antirom art collective was formed in London in 1994 as a “protest against ill-conceived point-and-click interfaces grafted onto repurposed old content repackaged as multimedia.” With the radical vision to explore interactivity as a media in its own right rather than as an interface to content, Antirom changed the face of interactive design. The original experiments were funded by a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain. Design agency Tomato contributed graphically, and the band Underworld provided the music. Developed rapidly by multiple authors, Antirom's interactive experiments often revolved around a single idea, such as sound mixing or scrolling. Although always entertaining, these playful, interactive “toys” could deliberately confound, forcing the user into an active relationship with the media. Built in Director 5.Word.com - 1995
Founded by Dan Pelson, Tom Livacarri and Carey Earle in 1995, Word.com was one of the earliest and most influential e-zines. Unlike many web publications of the time, which simply re-created the print magazine format online, Word.com was a true multimedia experience, incorporating games, audio, and chat. Its DIY ethos and first-person conversational style immediately appealed its audience of “underachieving sub-geniuses,” and the site was soon receiving 95,000 page views a day. Its authentic content and Yoshi Sodeoka's icon-driven design influenced hundreds of other sites, yet it was never a commercial success. But Word.com was also far from commercially naïve — a pioneer in the use of online advertising, it was the first website to integrate paid content for branded microsites. The site used HTML2.0, Director 5 & RealAudio.The Blue Dot - 1995
became one of the world's most established digital agencies partly because of a bouncing blue dot. Created out of an apartment in the East Village, its homepage utilized the server-push GIF-animation capabilities of Netscape Navigator 1.1 to create the first animated website — crashing many a browser in the process. Razorfish founders Jeffrey Dachis and Craig Kanarick followed this milestone with one of the first online art galleries, The Blue Dot. Created “for our souls” rather than commercial gain, The Blue Dot was a playground of art, design, photography, and provocation, showcasing work by artists like Ryan McGinness, Spencer Tunick, and Jill Greenberg. It notoriously included such delights as “The Society for the Recapture of Virginity” and “Dick for a Day.”The Blue Dot is now in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The site used HTML2.0, Director 5 & RealAudio.
CyberOrchids - 1996
Designer, programmer, technologist, artist, professor, author: John Maeda is all of these and more. Now president of the Rhode Island School of Design, the former associate research director of MIT's Media Lab has also enjoyed a long and productive commercial partnership with Japanese cosmetic brand Shiseido. Commissioned to accompany Shiseido's orchid e-commerce service, John Maeda's CyberOrchids, built as a Java applet, was one of the first e-card tools. The site used HTML 2.0, Java.The Web Stalker - 1997
Award-winner and “the first internet application designed by artists,” The Web Stalker is an experimental browser developed by British web-art activists I/O/D. Working on the principle that the browsers of the day were built to fulfil commercial imperatives determined by advertisers and software corporations rather than the information needs of the individual, The Web Stalker browser stripped out the superfluous, so only the raw text, links, and meta data remained. Built in Director 6.Noodle Box - 1997
Using Director 6 software, Noodle Box was a series of computer game like interactive experiments. Created by Play/Create and designed by Daniel Brown, the site featured a landscape of building blocks, inspired by the computer games of the 1980s. The site was set apart from many others of its time due to the playful nature of the site. Built in Director 6.Noodlebox appears in the San Francisco MOMA and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Head-space - 1997
The Head-space Project, created and curated by Jason Holland and Felix Velarde and produced by Head New Media, was a collaborative creative space and a spawning ground for multiple interactive projects such as the Brixton-based community website Urban 75 and John Lundberg's CircleMakers.org but was perhaps most famous for the interactive game Slap a Spice Girl. The site used both Director & HTML 3.K10k - 1997
K10k, also known as “The Designers’ Lunchbox,” was a global digital design portal. The site was the result of a chance meeting online between Toke Nygaard and Michael Schmidt. Nygaard and Schmidt gained inspiration from sites like DigitalThread.com and Shift.jp.org but wanted to create something that was “fresher and funkier, and updated every single week.”The site was built by and is built in HTML 4.0.
Less Rain - 1998
Less Rain was founded in 1997 by Vassilios Alexiou and Lars Eberle. The name they chose for their company not only reflects London's temperate climate but also their design philosophy. Clean, natural, playful and unpredictable. Kicking against the vector graphic trend dominating interaction design at the time, their early work had a hand-crafted feel, driven by photography. The first site they designed for themselves, nicknamed Walter The Fish, typified their approach. Walter was a grouper, bought at Billingsgate Fish Market in 1998. Photographed at five stages of consumption, he provided the navigation system for Less Rain's website. Those visiting on fast connection speeds were served the full fish. Slower speeds were offered the bare bones. Built in HTML 3.0, Director 6.0New Beetle - 1998
Founded in 1994, Deepend was one of the first true web design agencies. The Web's slow connection speeds, limited fonts and restricted colour palette deterred most designers. Gary Lockton, David Streek and Simon Waterfall were the exception. While their contemporaries were exploring the technical capabilities of the web, Deepend defined its aesthetic potential. Deepend websites for VW Beetle, Hoover and the Design Museum in ’98, ’99 and 2000 set the standard the rest of the industry aspired to. Incorporating great design, audio, video and games, they pushed the medium way beyond its supposed limits. Built in HTML 3.0, Flash 3.0, QuickTime 3.0Modern Living - 1998
Starting off life as a comic strip in 1996, Dutchman Han Hoogerbrugge began publishing his Modern Living / Neurotica animations to his website as a series of looping GIFs in ’98. Soon afterward, he progressed to Flash, which introduced an interactive element to his art. Describing his work as an ongoing self-portrait, the central theme of Hoogerbrugge’s work is his battle with modern life. The repetitive, jerky nature of his animations that so accurately reflect his neurosis are actually a result of the bandwidth restrictions of 1998. A 28k modem necessitates the short, low-frame-rate animations he has become famous for. The series concluded in 2001 when the 100th episode was published. Subsequent work includes the non-linear interactive story “Hotel,” developed for the Submarine Channel. The site is built using animated GIFs and Flash 3.Yugop - 1999
When Yugo Nakamura unveiled his MONO*crafts site at yugop.com in 1999, it made an entire industry stop and draw a breath. One of the first designers to embrace and exploit the potential of ActionScript, Nakamura's interactive environments were very fluid, calming, and natural. Previously a gardener, he quotes an old Japanese saying: “Rather than beautifying one’s own creation, make better the environment that surrounds it” — in other words, better to make a beautiful user experience than a beautiful website. Built in Flash 4.Jonni Nitro - 1999
In 1999, Jonni Nitro was the most exciting animation on the Web. Centred on a female secret agent on a quest against an unnamed terrorist threat, Tubatomic's G-Woman took its visual cues from graphic novels like Frank Miller's Sin City. Using a highly stylised video-to-vector process, the animated series pushed Flash well beyond its apparent capabilities. Built in Flash 4.Barneys - 2000
Founded by Peter Kang and Gene Na in 1999, one of Kioken's early websites was for the R & B singer Brandy, and a string of entertainment clients followed, most notably including Jennifer Lopez, Motown, and Bad Boy Records. Criticized by some for a lack of usability, contrary to popular opinion, Kioken was resolute in its belief that audiences raised in the video game era were practiced in deciphering interfaces — in fact, they took pleasure in the experience. Taking their cue from TV and video games, Kioken's websites had a depth and emotional quality absent from their counterparts. Full-bleed images, parallax movement, and floating palettes were used with great effect, all coming together beautifully on Barneys.com. According to Na, it's simple: “You have to think beyond the limits of a page.” Built in Flash 4.Levi Twisted Denim - 2000
Lateral was founded in 1997 by Jon Bains and Simon Crab. Quickly joined by David Jones and David Hart, they were already digital veterans, having worked at Obsolete since 1994. Their first account was Levi's Europe, an account they retained for a decade. The Levi Twisted Denim site, twists the browser, opening multiple windows and creating a usability nightmare in the process. Bravo to them. Built in HTML 4.01, Director 8.0, RealPlayer 4.0PrayStation - 2000
wanted to write and illustrate children's books. After his first two attempts received two rejection letters, a friend told him, “You don’t need them anymore — there’s this whole internet thing happening. You can self-publish.” Davis went out and bought a book on HTML and changed the face of interactive design forever. PrayStation was Joshua Davis's sketchbook — an experimental personal site of digital exploration, a place where success and failure were all documented, learned from and generously shared. Lessons weren't all that were given away: PrayStation was one of the first sites to provide its source files free. Fueled by his obsessive nature, the site evolved at an astonishing rate, and Davis built a devoted audience and a deserved reputation as the most exciting web designer on the planet. Built in Flash 4.MTV2 - 2000
MTV2's BAFTA award-winning website designed by Bradley Cho-Smith and Mickey Stretton and built by agency Digit and was known for marking the first time the creative started with the web and led the TV and print campaigns. It was built largely in Flash, and exploited multiple 3D-authoring tools like Vecta 3D, 3D Studio Max, and Swift 3D.The site's styling is draws inspiration from classic first-person shooter games like Doom or Quake, and there are more subtle culture references to classic video games and science-fiction movies throughout. One example being the rise of a faceted block that exits the screen in homage to the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.
Built in Flash 8, Vectra 3D, 3D Studio Max, Swift 3D.