Elegiac (2025)
Chia Amisola
In Chia Amisola's Elegiac, hundreds of browser windows unfold on the desktop, weaving a narrative around cultural myths of creation & destruction with the internet's cycles of collapse & repair. Entirely composed from media, sound, and text sourced from the Internet Archive, the generative work presents an ever-changing hypertextual myth out of the stories the internet chooses to tell itself. Throughout their practice, Amisola's sites represent acts of self-preservation in a medium always at risk of disappearance, attempting to make sense of intimate histories and selves amidst what has been collectively preserved and lost.
alive internet theory theory is a séance with the Internet, told through tens of millions of digital media files from the Internet Archive. The piece takes visitors on a trip through the life of the web as we created it; every image, video, song, and text was uploaded by a person on the web. This overwhelming sea of human "content" offers a striking contrast to today, where an increasing amount is created solely by AI. At the same time, the piece incorporates the machine’s perspective. Many visual effects were created by asking frontier AI models to reflect on how they would visualize their own experience training on this very data to become human-like. What separates us from the machine and ultimately, what do we consider human?
The Lives of Infamous Men is an infinite algorithmic web-based video, where a slightly-edited version of Foucault’s essay of the same name is read by a re-composited American politicians and TV news personalities. The essay is an introduction for a fictional book, proposed but never written, where Foucault collects small snippets of text from the prison archives of the Hópital général and the Bastille from the 17th and 18th centuries. In it, Foucault speculates on the lives of these men: their pathos, melodrama, and ultimately their forgettability - only their brief encounter with the despotic power of the king causes them to be remembered. The video is generated live in-browser, and refreshes itself regularly using clips from Internet Archive’s TV News Collections. Read by the characters of contemporary television, the text shifts between one where we see the speakers as the infamous men, petty criminals destined to be mostly forgotten, or in turn, the apparatus of power.
During her childhood growing up in the web 1.0 era, artist Ophira Horwitz created and hosted her own role-playing chatroom based around the mythology of Sailor Moon: a foundational Japanese anime & manga series written by Naoko Takeuchi and published by Kodansha comics. In this online space of her own creation, roughly hewn from bits of rudimentary HTML, Horwitz invited strangers to play with her. Together, they created a text-based fantasy world. As she grew up and the landscape of the Internet changed, these kinds of distributed, intimate, hyper-niche online social spaces gave way to centralized, feed-based platforms.
Horwitz’ Sailor Moon social RPG page is now inoperable; yet, fragments remain in the depths of the Internet Archive. To honor the memory hers and all bygone fora for imagination, connection, and creativity, Horwitz created a virtual shrine with ASCII artworks composed from digital fragments of the original site and other found archived materials.
Today, Horwitz works professionally as an artificial intelligence “ jailbreaker”— someone who tests the limits of the most advanced consumer machine learning products with the ultimate goal of making them safer. As a result, her creative practice and perspective on digital culture have been profoundly impacted by AI. In recent experiments, Horwitz has worked across a wide variety of prompt-based AI models to create a unique mode for autopoietic writing. Included in the Pretty Guardian Shrine is the artist’s first book of AI poetry, available on-site as a printed book and online as a downloadable pdf. In it, Horwitz rewired the model to essentially speak for her and complete her sentences, and together write poetry that processes the acute grief of heartbreak.
Hello World Wide Web is a web page that explores the evolving contours of the largest networked information medium known to humanity; a meditation on the origins and history of the World Wide Web. It curates glimpses of some foundational websites from the formative eras of the Web, retrieving most of them from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Presented as an interactive timeline, the work allows viewers to immerse themselves in the rich history of networked culture, in the process gleaning critical cultural context for both the lasting value of the Internet Archive’s work and the internet itself.
Olivia M. Ross’s Pandora’s Aquarium (2025) is a speculative hypertext fiction account of a “deep sea liberation war” fought by cyborgian mermaids against the profanities of Man, in conversation with her earlier videopoem Prayer To An Ebony Teen Slut (2021) and the Sycorax Video Style of Dr. Kamau Braithwaite. Presented in the browser, and connecting to the user’s webcam, Pandora’s Aquarium weaves a ‘choose your own adventure’ tale on top of the reader’s own reflection. The story considers a postcolonial reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, centering close analysis of the unseen character Sycorax who is thought of by Dr. Braithwaite and other scholars as an archetypal representation of silenced African & Caribbean women. In this tradition, which often seeks to give voice to unheard indigenous stories, Ross offers a new techno-seapunk fantasy that nods to the history of cyberpunk literature, early interactive fiction experiences of the late 20th century, and webcam-based video performance works of the 2000s.
“During my time studying the late Dr. Kamau Braithwaite’s work, I was struck by the vivid hypermedia texture of his poetry practice, as a Barbadian computer programmer myself. It was Dr. Braithwaite’s relationship to computers, and his relationship to the Shakespearean play The Tempest which inspired me to read Aime Cesaire’s postcolonial reinterpretation of the play, A Tempest (1969)— and to dig deeper into the symbolism of Sycorax in Caribbean and feminist Philosophy.”
– Olivia M Ross
“At the time of Zea Mexican’s death in 1986, he [Braithwaite] had not mastered the computer and could not retrieve some work of his that she had committed to the computer’s memory. This increased his panic that aspects of his written self could perish, with him helpless to prevent it. Dream Chad, begun in August 1988, presents the computer as memory, silent archives of a literary life and Brathwaite’s link with his wife’s lifelong dedication to nurturing and preserving his work on computer. Learning to access it became for him a kind of therapy.”
- Gordon Rohlehr’s Introduction to Dr. Kamau Braithwaite’s DreamStories (1994)
1,000,000,000 (2025)
Jesse Walton
Site-Specific Sculpture
Jesse Walton’s site-specific installation 1,000,000,000,000 was developed in 2025 to commemorate the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine’s milestone of one trillion web pages archived. Walton fabricated the numbers using their own “2x4” font.
In this interactive net.artwork, artist Rodell Warner developed a generative web application that creates “ghosts” from scattered digital materials across discarded blogs from the Web 1.0 era, now contained within the Internet Archive. Each digital asset has been excavated from someone’s personal page, which the artist spent days pouring over and selecting intimate fragments from. Through a serendipitous, algorithmic process of recall from this highly curated dataset, Warner forces the found content to overlap and occupy the same display area. Ephemeral phantasms from a lost era of the web float across the page, conjuring an eerie feeling of looking through the veil of digital life and death. Ripped out of their original contexts, a bygone era of visual culture, the results of this experiment create connotations and connections, both intentional and unintentional, on each of media artifacts in the mind of the viewer. In this way, Warner invites audiences to consider the visual legacy of the Archive collection and its lasting impact on cultural memory.
