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Thinking about the small web:

I was born the same year as the internet. My dad was a software engineer for Westinghouse. I learned HTML and CSS and made small websites on Geocities. I had my own blog and was a part of a group blog run by some older kids I looked up to.

And then at some point, in high school, I joined Facebook. And ever since then I completely forgot about my autonomous ability to create and shape my own little slice of the world wide web. The freedom to properly shape my digital persona how I felt fit.

Rather than residing in the flourishing and vibrant neighborhoods of geociities, we are all now living in cookie cutter row houses of the Meta suburbs.

Inspired by a recent workshop on the “small web”, I’ve made the long overdue decision to overhaul my personal website.

The “small web” is equal parts political and aesthetic. It engages with questions, posed by the early web, about what it means to have a personal presence online but in the light of today’s ubiquitous social media and commercialization (https://endmatter.neocities.org/smallweb)

This is partly inspired by wanting to step away from the monolithic, commercialized, algorithmically-driven doom-pits of instagram and other “social” medias, but still retain a place of digital domain and a place to share my thoughts and ideas.

I see this a research-creation project. By working within small web principles I have very minute control over every aspect of design and can think much more critically about what I do, and how I do it. It’s a conscious decision to move away from the simply aesthetic choices driven by a desire to fit in to what I thought an artist website should be.

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Thinking about my research question as a haiku:

Was challenge by my prof to structure my research question as a haiku. I quickly spit this out in class:

Deeper Digital

Making critical artwork 

For a more just world

This touches on the broad picture I'm looking at, but I know it'll have to be narrowed down. Going to start thinking about specific mediums/techniques/theory I could hone in on.