<nettime> still there

[olia lialina <olia@profolia.org>]

Dear nettimers,

I thought I should post the intro to my Still There research here. There 
must be still people on the list who remember what I remember, or 
remember it differently.

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/still-there/

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In September 1996, I came to Rotterdam to participate in the Dutch 
Electronic Art Festival – not as an artist yet but as a film curator, 
or, to say it better, as a film curator from Moscow who made a website 
for a film club. For many people, the mid-90s were all about going 
online, making websites, travelling to the East and to the West.[1]

It was my very first media art event. I was overwhelmed by the scope and 
scale of the interactive installations – the huge, loud constructions of 
Knowbotic Research; the scary performances of half-human, half-cyborg 
Stelarc; the trips in a virtual submarine that seemed so real, and other 
interactive and immersive stuff distributed throughout the city. The 
modern architecture of Rotterdam was truly enhanced by all of these 
futuristic objects with their surprises inside.

One of them – an inflatable internet café floating on a canal in 
Rotterdam’s centre – left a strong impression on me. I kept thinking 
about it and talking about it over the years. After all, it was the 
first thing I saw as I headed from the railway station to the DEAF 
offices, and it was so different from any other previous experiences I’d 
had with the internet in public spaces. I had never been to a “normal” 
internet café before and suddenly I found myself in this totally 
over-the-top place.

Well, years later I found out that it was not really an internet café 
but an “an intelligent object,” an “inflatable sculpture with brains 
connected to the World Wide Web”[2] called ParaSITE and built by the 
Dutch architect Kas Oosterhuis and his team.

After I squeezed inside through the tight soft gates, I found myself in 
a space that can probably best be described as the inside of a spaceship 
or other apparatus designed to take you into outer space. Stylish 
pillows wrapped in plastic invited you to make yourself comfortable and 
situate yourself behind the connected computers. As well as check your 
email — for free.

The place was crowded. People were reading and writing emails, looking 
up the URLs they had recently received from other festival venues on 
business cards and pieces of paper. Everyone really enjoyed the 
atmosphere there.

The festival’s participants would no doubt have enjoyed being online in 
more trivial situations. They would have happily rushed to the computers 
even if they hadn’t been installed inside this zeppelin-like bubble. The 
extraterrestrial beeps and blinks it was producing were not the reason 
why people were coming and staying inside. But still, it felt very right 
that the internet-connected PCs had a special space constructed just for 
them in a special location. After all accessing a mail server is not 
nearly as exciting as entering the CAVE. Opening a page in a browser 
can’t be compared to the spectacular act of manipulating Stelarc through 
electronic impulses. On the other hand, the notion that there was 
something bigger happening right now was in the air. The interactive 
monsters of the day were just about to become obsolete, making way for 
bigger and more important things, namely, the World Wide Web.

Back then, going online and just being online were the thing to do. 
Networking was the passcode into the new millennium. And we, people on 
the web, even those who just had started to make their own pages, would 
fly into it soon to become human apparatuses like that gorgeous zeppelin 
moored on the channel in Westersingel street.

I came back to Rotterdam in October 2010 with an exciting new challenge 
from the research program at the Willem de Kooning Academy – to write 
about Rotterdam’s internet cafés. After years of working online, 
researching the vernacular web and digital folklore, I was about to 
begin my investigations of the “low forms” of digital culture in real life.

From my window in my Goethe Institute apartment on the Westersingel, I 
could see the canal, but, of course, ParaSITE was long gone and, I 
should add, along with it, all of that mid-90s excitement about the Web 
as well. But this kind of statement doesn’t really begin to capture what 
has actually happened since then.

Over the past one-and-a-half decades, the internet has experienced its 
ups and downs, the WWW has been kissed goodbye and welcomed back a 
number of times. And as I write this, it has again disappeared from the 
centre of media attention. In fact, in August 2010, Wired declared the 
web dead again, with its editor-in-chief casually observing that “The 
Web is not the culmination of digital revolution.”[3]

Ironically, the next big thing according to Wired is all about 
interactivity, just like in the early 90s. Only this time, the focus has 
been narrowed down to the interactions that people have with that one 
particular mobile device that you can touch and shake. The New Media 
world is totally preoccupied with imagining and testing new apps for 
mobile phones. This made it an interesting time for me to commence with 
my research, just as the spiral of technological evolution was making 
yet another new turn, bringing a certain completeness to the entire 
period before it, which gives us an opportunity to highlight it and 
analyse the phenomena that are still there, but already belong to 
another era.

Among them are the internet cafés, places you won’t need to visit if you 
are equipped according to modern standards. And users are fleeing the 
number one Dutch social network, Hyves, for the seemingly cleaner and 
better organized Facebook, marking another endpoint of the web’s 
diversity and decentralisation.

In the mean time, Geocities, millions of home pages created over the 
past 15 years, was officially shut down by Yahoo in 2009, but was 
quickly rescued by a group of underground archivists who made it public 
again in late 2010. Both, Geocities’ destruction and the resurrection, 
are significant events for web culture.

I’ve been buying connection time in various Rotterdam belhuizen (Dutch 
for “call shop”), browsing through Hyves user profiles, analyzing 
Geocities pages, to find myself amongst the ruins of the Web that I 
believe was a culmination of the digital revolution.

Rotterdam, 2011 - 2012


[1] And getting funding for all those activities from George Soros.
[2] ONL, ParaSITE, 1996, version from 31 December 2011
http://www.oosterhuis.nl/quickstart/index.php?id=173
[3] Chris Anderson, The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet, Wired, 17 
August 2010 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

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http://contemporary-home-computing.org/still-there/


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