A text file on a machine connected to a network.
Everything else is a choice.
“Page” is a metaphor borrowed from print. But a webpage scrolls, responds, resizes, refuses. It’s a viewport, not a surface. What gets composed here is spatial and temporal at once.
Layout, typography, colour, interaction. Also what’s withheld.
My Boyfriend Came Back From the War (1996)
Hypertext narrative in nested frames. Click and the frame splits. Story fragments as you navigate.
mouchette.org (1996 onwards)
Poses as the personal site of a 13-year-old girl. Art, fiction, identity, interaction. Author anonymous for over a decade.
Overflowing Gardens of Decay (2021)
Web crawler finds dead links and broken URLs, injects poetry into the abandoned spaces. Residency at Nokturno, Finland.
Research at UAL CCI on internet decay as aesthetic phenomenon. From Scavenging Lost Worlds: only 1.11% of news site links last longer than three months.
On the web, the construction is always visible. Right-click → View Source on any website. The building and the blueprint are the same thing. There is no backstage.
jodi.org (1995 onwards). Joan Heemskerk & Dirk Paesmans.
Source code is the artwork. The “broken” interface is intentional. The real composition lives in the HTML.
sometimesredsometimesblue.com (2007)
One line. Domain name is the title is the description is the work.
Zucconi: “Eventually I realized the webpage can be art itself.”
Nick Montfort, MIT. Online literary magazine for computational works under 2KB. Readers encouraged to View Source.
Form Art (1997)
Checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, text fields. Raw material for abstract compositions. No images, no colour, no text.
Also launched a $1000 Form Art Competition. Genuine open call and parody of Prix Ars Electronica at once.
Shulgin: “A computer interface is not a ‘transparent’ invisible layer to be taken for granted, but something that defines the way we are forced to work and even think.”
The browser is someone else’s software running your work. It decides how elements render, what it stores, what it blocks, how fast it loads. The same HTML can look completely different in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or a phone from 2014. The browser is not a window. It’s a mediator with opinions.
Form Art changes over time without anyone touching it. Form elements render differently across operating systems and browsers. What you see on macOS today looks nothing like Windows 98. The browser changed around the work.
Summer (2013)
Woman swinging. Animated GIF distributed across 20+ servers. Each hosts one frame at the same path. Browser redirects server to server.
Animation plays in the address bar as much as on the page. Server goes down, swing stops.
Lialina: “What happens in the location bar is more important than what happens in the window.”
Ang Bantayog (2023)
11,103 candles for victims of Philippine Martial Law. One per day, each reveals a name. Uses localStorage: the browser’s own memory becomes the memorial.
Candle count designed to crash most browsers.
Amisola: “I’m creating something designed for its own disappearance, as a memorial to those who have disappeared.”
Fifty Thousand Names (2025)
Single HTML page. 50,000 names of Palestinian dead hard-coded into the source. Arranged by age at death. The browser strains under the weight of the DOM.
2025 Tiny Awards winner.
Scarin: “Tiny is political. Tiny is revolutionary.”
A domain is a rented name in a global registry. You don’t own it, you lease it. The TLD (the bit after the dot) carries geopolitics: .io is the British Indian Ocean Territory, .tv is Tuvalu, .ai is Anguilla. All country codes repurposed as branding.
The URL path after the domain is an address, but addresses always imply a spatial logic. Where things are, what’s next to what, what’s at the root.
Black Gooey Universe (2018)
Racial politics of the GUI. White background. Black text. “Default” assumptions.
Domain: americanartist.us. The .us TLD is part of the work.
**_readme.html** (1998)
Every word in a press article hyperlinked to a URL matching it. “the” links to the.com.
dictionary.blue (2016). Definitions without words. Colors (2014). Colour names accumulating in the URL, endlessly.
On hosting: “The operative word when publishing on the web is ‘host.’”
Kristoffer Tjalve. Five poems made entirely from real, clickable domain names.
FloodNet (1998)
Java applet. Collective “virtual sit-ins” flooding target websites. First action: Mexican president’s site, solidarity with the Zapatistas.
Type “justice” into the URL field. Server returns “justice not found.” Names of 45 civilians killed in the Acteal massacre entered into the error logs this way.
Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007). Cheap phones helping border crossers find water. Also delivered poetry. Dominguez nearly lost his tenure.
irational.org . Deliberate misspelling.
sometimesredsometimesblue.com . Domain is the work.
special.fish . Elliott Cost’s creative community.
A .garden feels different from a .com.
£5 to £15/year.
The 404 page is also yours. A server response that became a cultural object.
A server is a computer in a room somewhere with a permanent connection. “The cloud” is a building. Hosting means choosing a jurisdiction, an energy source, a dependency. Self-hosting means the server is in your life. Platform hosting means it’s in someone else’s business model.
Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, Benedetta Piantella.
Solar-powered servers across six continents. Traffic routes to whichever server has the most sun.
50W panel, 22Ah battery, <3W per server. Low battery = degraded design. If it dies, it dies.
The internet is physical. Fibre optic cables on the ocean floor. Data centres drawing water for cooling. Landing stations on coastlines where the network surfaces. The infrastructure is material, geographic, and owned by someone.
Landscapes (2016 onwards)
Long-duration videos filmed where undersea cables make landfall. Where the network touches the earth.
How do you sell a URL? How does a collector acquire sometimesredsometimesblue.com?
Zucconi’s approach: Raspberry Pi inside a Samsung TV, shown through JTT gallery. Framing a website as an object to make it collectible. Solving the problem by turning the medium into something else.
Most web art exists outside the market entirely.
Marangoni: 1.11% of news links survive three months.
Browsers update. Servers go down. Companies fold. Shulgin’s Form Art looks different now than in 1997, not because anyone changed it but because the browsers changed around it.
Half the net.art canon is broken.
Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology and oldweb.today (legacy browser emulation) are active attempts to keep this work accessible.
Palestine Online (Amad Ansari, 2023 onwards). Palestinian websites from the late 1990s/early 2000s recovered from the Wayback Machine. Homepages, memorials, student magazines, recipes, HTML tutorials. Presented at SFPC Software for Artists Day. Shown on CRT monitors in community workshops in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Morehshin Allahyari. Material Speculation: ISIS (2016 onwards). 3D-printed reconstructions of artefacts destroyed by ISIS. USB drives embedded inside each sculpture. All research data inside. Inaccessible unless you break the work.
Hasan Elahi. Tracking Transience (2003 onwards). After FBI interrogation following a false terrorism identification, Elahi started publishing everything. GPS, every meal, every toilet, every airport. 70,000+ images. Self-archiving as counter-surveillance.
Mindy Seu. Cyberfeminism Index (2020 onwards). Living archive. The form (searchable, browsable, accretive) is inseparable from the content. cyberfeminismindex.com
Sam Lavigne. Scrapism (Duke University Press, 2023). Web scraping as critical practice. “Everything we need to know about power is online, hiding in plain sight.” lav.io
Naive Weekly. Kristoffer Tjalve. Sunday newsletter on the quiet, odd and poetic web. ~5,000 subscribers since 2018.
Tiny Awards. Celebrating small, handmade websites. Winners: Rotating Sandwiches, One Minute Park, Fifty Thousand Names.
The Wrong Biennale. 7th edition running now. 2,300+ artists, 146 pavilions. Free. Decentralised.
The HTML Review. Annual journal. Every piece is an HTML file. Editors met at SFPC. Pays $500.
SFPC. School for Poetic Computation. “More poetry, less demo.” Alumni include Lauren McCarthy (p5.js), American Artist, Sam Lavigne.
Welcome to my Homepage. Net art residency. Museum of Human Achievement, Austin. 100+ artists. Uses mmm.page.
Rhizome. Microgrants ($500 to $1,500) for new web artworks. Nearly 1,000 proposals in 2024.
Laurel Schwulst, My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge (2018). Co-runs html.energy with Elliott Cost.
Aria Dean, Poor Meme, Rich Meme (2016).
Aria Dean, Tactical Poetics (2016). On FloodNet.
A text editor. A browser.
That’s it.
Save as index.html. Open in browser. Done.
Neocities. Drag and drop, built-in editor. neocities.org
GitHub Pages. Static hosting. pages.github.com
Glitch. Collaborative, in the browser. glitch.com
mmm.page. No-code, feels like collage. mmm.page
Olia Lialina, A Vernacular Web (2005)
Laurel Schwulst, My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge (2018)
J.R. Carpenter, A Handmade Web (2015)
American Artist, Black Gooey Universe (2018)
Aria Dean, Poor Meme, Rich Meme (2016)
Sam Lavigne, Scrapism (Duke University Press, 2023)