Video Installation: One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age

Historic Geocities home page, last updated 1996-07-08 01:43:37 more videos …

The project One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age contains 350'000 amateur home pages from the free web hosting service Geocities, last updated during the second half of the 1990's. Established in 1995 and purchased by Yahoo in 1999, Geocities was suddenly shut down by Yahoo in 2009. Realising its cultural significance, the Archive Team managed to rescue an incomplete portion of Geocities which now lives on as a massive downloadable Torrent file.

Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied are presenting a non-stop stream of video captures of this lost city and its archival ruins, documenting the visual culture of the web and the creativity of its users. The project provides a glimpse into web publishing when users were in charge of design and narration in contrast to the automated templates of Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.

The project consists of two parts:

1. Online, as a tumblr performance, posting a new screen shot every 20 minutes, for the next 14 years; started on February 7th 2013. (Webmonkey, Hyperallergic)
2. For exhibition spaces, as a video installation. Massive set of lossless looping video captures, showing the pages fully animated. examples …

Extensive research and restoration work has been done to make this project possible. The source material is treated with maximum competence, care and respect, resulting in the most high-fidelity archival material of early web culture available to the public as of yet.

We see several ways of presenting the videos in physical space:

• On a single digital display, showing the videos non-stop in chronological order, changing video loops in a certain interval. This is the way it is currentlywas installed at The Photographer's Gallery from 2013-04-18 to 2013-07-07 in London, providing sixeight weeks of video.
  (exhibition photos 1, 2, 3; video)
• On multiple digital displays, each screen showing a selected Geocities neighborhood, a certain year, or a curated set according to formal qualities or content.

Recent related projects

• Once Upon (2011-2012)
• Memoirs (2012)
• 1000 years (2012)
• Animated GIF Timeline (2012)

Contact: olia@profolia.org

Artists' CV

Moscow-born artist Olia Lialina has, for the past decade, produced many influential works of network-based art: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), Agatha Appears (1997), First Real Net Art Gallery (1998), and Last Real Net Art Museum (2000). Currently she is a professor at Merz Akademie in Germany. Lialina writes on digital culture, net art and web vernacular.

Dragan Espenschied, born in Germany, works as a lecturer at Merz Akademie and researches Digital Foklore and Digital Conservation at the Bern University of the Arts and the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. His music and online art has received international acclaim. He co-founded the home computer band Bodenständig 2000 that toured and released records throughout Europe and the USA. He has also won the Webby Awards People's Voice NET ART (2004), and the ZKM International Media Art Award (2001).

Since 2002 Olia and Dragan have worked together. Among their collaborations are Zombie and Mummy (2002-2003), Midnight (2006), and Online Newspapers (2004, 2008, 2013), Digital Folklore Reader (2009). Individually and as collaborative partners, the work of both artists has been exhibited extensively online and at venues including Ars Electronica, Linz; the New Museum, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Transmediale, Berlin; Havana Biennial, Cuba; ACAF, Alexandria; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ABC Gallery, Moscow; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Madison Square Park, New York.