Digital Folklore

The world’s first exhibition around digital folklore is based on the archive "One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age", which comprises the remains of 381,934 GeoCities homepages made by amateurs in the pre-industrial era of the World Wide Web. GeoCities, the first free web hosting service, was created in 1994. Only five years later, it sold to Yahoo!, then an Internet giant, which eventually shut it down in 2009. Although GeoCities holds an eminent place in the short history of the WWW as one of its most visited servers at one point, it was short-lived and has already fallen into oblivion. All that is left are the legends and rituals surrounding it.

Among the 28 million+ files – which were hastily copied a few days before total deletion – are user-built personal websites, fan, mourning, recipe, arts and crafts, computer game and domestic pet pages, rotating “Welcome To My Homepage” and “Under Construction” signs, shiny-stars wallpapers and jittery animated characters. For the purpose of this exhibition, these and many other manifestations have been digitally restored and reinterpreted by artists.

"Computer and net culture are only marginally determined by technological innovation. After all, it is irrelevant who has invented the microchip, the mouse, the TCP/IP protocol or the World Wide Web, or what was the rationale behind them. What matters, rather, is who is using them, and to what avail. If computer technology has any cultural significance, it is indeed solely owed to its users. Yet their own creative efforts, from shiny-stars live wallpapers to pictures of cute cats or rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or general cultural waste. Digital Folklore argues that this apparent aesthetic clutter, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and widely misunderstood language of New Media." www.digitalfolklore.org

An exhibition by the GeoCities Research Institute and HMKV. Digital Folklore is a sequel to the immensely popular exhibition „Jetzt helfe ich mir selbst“ (Now I Can Help Myself) - The 100 best Internet video tutorials shown at HMKV in 2014.

Design: labor b designbüro, Dortmund

In Cooperation with:

Merz Akademie - Hochschule für Gestaltung, Kunst und Medien, Stuttgart

Cultural Partner:

WDR 3

Media Partner:

ARTE Creative
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