Scavenging Lost Worlds: The Aesthetics and Creative Possibilities of Internet Decay

In this paper, I will investigate what is and what causes content to decay on websites, and how it can be used to propel new discussions on aesthetics and digital ontologies. In the specific context of the Web, content decay has a unique non-linear degradation process. The idea of novelty is prevalent in the rhetoric of design and technology, while failure and indeterminacy are less welcomed (Mazé 2007). However, the increased dependability on online services due to COVID-19 hastened a propitious momentum to address the ephemerality of Internet infrastructure. By focusing on its ‘ruins’, I would like to question how that desolate view can propel aesthetic and ontological discussions, addressing digital culture from a less instrumental point of view to propose a distinct form of ‘inevitable aesthetic` – stemmed from Lebbeus Woods’ notions on architectural decay (Woods 2012) – and its long-term implications. There is more to media and aesthetic experiences than normative ones powered by late capitalism, thus, paying attention to what is deliberately missing or left behind due to forgetfulness, offers new opportunities to understand and criticize the technological systems, and a chance for forgotten narratives to thrive and persist.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Mariana Marangoni

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 90-95

Affiliations

[0001]London College of Communication

London, United Kingdom

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.12

SO-VID: f9b7611e-55d8-4222-a84f-b49471fb5a20

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.12

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

Access Now (2021) ‘Internet shutdowns threaten elections in Uganda’, Access Now. Available at: http://www.accessnow.org/uganda-internet-shutdowns-threaten-elections/ (Accessed: 05 August 2021)
J. Bennett (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press.
J. Borges (1998) ‘The library of Babel’, Collected Fictions, Viking Press.
S. Boym (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
B. Bratton (2016) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press.
K. Cascone (2000). ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’. Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 12-18. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3681551 (Accessed: 10 August 2021)
P. Connerton in R. Harrison (2013) Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge.
P. Costantin (2018) Machines will watch us die: a curatorial study of the contemporaneity of digital decay. Doctoral thesis (PhD), institutionManchester: Metropolitan University . Available at: http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/622934/1/Patrizia%20Costantin%20PhD%20Thesis%20final.pdf (Accessed: 10 December 2020)
G Cox and J. Lund (2016). The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
F. Cramer (2015) ‘What Is ’Post-Digital’?’, in D.M. Berry & M. Dieter Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computation and design. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
M. Day (2003) ‘Preserving the Fabric of Our Lives: A Survey of Web Preservation Initiatives’. In: T. Koch, I.T. Sølvberg (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. ECDL 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2769. Berlin: Springer.
J. Derrida (1993) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York: Routledge Classics.
C. DeSilvey (2017) Curated Decay: Heritage beyond Saving. London: University of Minnesota Press.
T. Edensor (2005) ‘The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume 23, 829 – 849.
M. Fisher (2012) ‘What is Hauntology?’. Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 16–24. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16 (Accessed: 05 August 2021)
C. Fuchs (2017) Social Media: A critical introduction. London: Sage.
GDELT Project (2019) ‘A Look at Frontpage Link Lifespan Through 10 Months of The Global Frontpage Graph (GFG)’, The GDELT Project Blog. Available at: http://blog.gdeltproject.org/a-look-at-frontpage-link-lifespan-through-10-months-of-the-global-frontpage-graph-gfg/ (Accessed: 28 June 2021)
P. K. Haff (2013) ‘Technology as a geological phenomenon: Implications for human well-being’. In: CN. Waters; J. Zalasiewicz; M. Williams (eds) A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene. London: Geological Society.
G. Hecht (2018) ‘Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence’, Cultural Anthropology 33:1. Available at: http://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca33.1.05 (Accessed: 05 August 2021)
N. Heer (2018) ‘The Bullshit Web’, Pixel Envy. Available at: http://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/ (Accessed: 10 August 2021)
V. Heikkilä (2021) ‘Permacomputing Update 2021’, Viznut blog. Available at: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing_update_2021.html (Accessed: 05 August 2021)
G. Hertz and J. Parikka (2012) ‘Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method’, LEONARDO, Vol. 45, No. 5, pp. 424–430.
HTTP Archive (2020) State of the Web Report. Available at: http://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-the-web?start=earliest&end=latest&view=list (Accessed: 10 June 2021)
S. Jackson (2013) ‘Rethinking Repair’ in D. Gillespie Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, pp. 221–240.
M. Kosec (2016) ‘The potential of ruins or the ruin of potential?’, Ruincarnations vol. 2.
O. Lialina (2010) A Vernacular Web. Available at: http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular (Accessed: 05 August 2021)
M. Liboiron (2018) ‘Waste colonialism’, Discard Studies. Available at: http://discardstudies.com/ 2018/11/01/waste-colonialism/ (Accessed: 10 August 2021)
D. Linvega (2020) ‘A holistic approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture.’, XXIIVV wiki. Available at: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/ site/permacomputing.html (Accessed: 05 August 2021)
J. Lyotard (1984) ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’, Artforum, 20:8. Available at: http://www. artforum.com/print/198404/the-sublime-and-the-avant-garde-32533 (Accessed: 13 August 2021)
M. Marangoni (2020) Merciless Entropy. Available at: http://marianamarangoni.com/merciless_entropy.jpg (Accessed: 20 August 2021)
S. Mattern (2015) ‘Deep Time of Media Infrastructure’. In L. Parks, & N. Starosielski (eds.) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
R. Mazé (2007) Occupying Time: Design, technology, and the form of interaction. Stockholm: Axl Books.
N. Montgomery (2013) ‘Summary: Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett’, Cultivating Alternatives. Available at: http://cultivatingalternatives.com/2013/11/28/summary-vibrant-matter-by-jane-bennett/ (Accessed: 20 August 2021)
S. O’Sullivan (2016) ‘Myth-Science and the Fictioning of Reality’, Paragrana 25. Available at: http://www.academia.edu/19872052/Mythopoesis_and_the_Fictioning_of_Reality (Accessed: 05 August 2021)
J. Parikka (2012) What is media archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press.
J. Parikka (2014) The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
J. Parikka (2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
B. Raghavan (2015) ‘Abstraction, Indirection, and Sevareid’s Law: Towards Benign Computing’, ICSI. Available at: http://computingwithinlimits.org/2015/papers/limits2015-raghavan.pdf (Accessed: 05 August 2021)
L. Ritasdatter (2020) Unwrapping COBOL: Lessons in Crisis Computing. Malmö: Malmö University.
R. Schneider (2018) ‘Slough Media’, Remain.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
P. Servigne and R. Stevens (2020) How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, Cambridge: Polity Press.
B. Sterling (1995) ‘The DEAD MEDIA Project - A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal’, Dead Media Blog. Available at: http://www.deadmedia.org/ modest-proposal.html (Accessed: 05 August 2021)
D. Trigg (2006) The aesthetics of decay. Bern: Peter Lang Press.
L. Woods (2012) ‘Inevitable Architecture’. Lebbeus Woods Blog. Available at: http://lebbeuswoods. wordpress.com/2012/07/09/inevitable-architecture/ (Accessed: 12 August 2021)
J. Zalasiewicz, M. Williams, C. Waters, A. Barnosky and P. Haff (2014) ‘The Technofossil Record of Humans.’ Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1: 34–43. Available at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/ 10.1177/2053019613514953?journalCode=anra (Accessed: 07 August 2021)
S. Zielinski (2006) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Access Now (2021) ‘Internet shutdowns threaten elections in Uganda’, Access Now. Available at: http://www.accessnow.org/uganda-internet-shutdowns-threaten-elections/ (Accessed: 05 August 2021)

[2] J. Bennett (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press.

[3] J. Borges (1998) ‘The library of Babel’, Collected Fictions, Viking Press.

[4] S. Boym (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

[5] B. Bratton (2016) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press.

[6] K. Cascone (2000). ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’. Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 12-18. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3681551 (Accessed: 10 August 2021)

[7] P. Connerton in R. Harrison (2013) Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge.

[8] P. Costantin (2018) Machines will watch us die: a curatorial study of the contemporaneity of digital decay. Doctoral thesis (PhD), institutionManchester: Metropolitan University . Available at: http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/622934/1/Patrizia%20Costantin%20PhD%20Thesis%20final.pdf (Accessed: 10 December 2020)

[9] G Cox and J. Lund (2016). The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

[10] F. Cramer (2015) ‘What Is ’Post-Digital’?’, in D.M. Berry & M. Dieter Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computation and design. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

[11] M. Day (2003) ‘Preserving the Fabric of Our Lives: A Survey of Web Preservation Initiatives’. In: T. Koch, I.T. Sølvberg (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. ECDL 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2769. Berlin: Springer.

[12] J. Derrida (1993) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York: Routledge Classics.

[13] C. DeSilvey (2017) Curated Decay: Heritage beyond Saving. London: University of Minnesota Press.

[14] T. Edensor (2005) ‘The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume 23, 829 – 849.

[15] M. Fisher (2012) ‘What is Hauntology?’. Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 16–24. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16 (Accessed: 05 August 2021)

[16] C. Fuchs (2017) Social Media: A critical introduction. London: Sage.

[17] GDELT Project (2019) ‘A Look at Frontpage Link Lifespan Through 10 Months of The Global Frontpage Graph (GFG)’, The GDELT Project Blog. Available at: http://blog.gdeltproject.org/a-look-at-frontpage-link-lifespan-through-10-months-of-the-global-frontpage-graph-gfg/ (Accessed: 28 June 2021)

[18] P. K. Haff (2013) ‘Technology as a geological phenomenon: Implications for human well-being’. In: CN. Waters; J. Zalasiewicz; M. Williams (eds) A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene. London: Geological Society.

[19] G. Hecht (2018) ‘Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence’, Cultural Anthropology 33:1. Available at: http://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca33.1.05 (Accessed: 05 August 2021)

[20] N. Heer (2018) ‘The Bullshit Web’, Pixel Envy. Available at: http://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/ (Accessed: 10 August 2021)

[21] V. Heikkilä (2021) ‘Permacomputing Update 2021’, Viznut blog. Available at: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing_update_2021.html (Accessed: 05 August 2021)

[22] G. Hertz and J. Parikka (2012) ‘Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method’, LEONARDO, Vol. 45, No. 5, pp. 424–430.

[23] HTTP Archive (2020) State of the Web Report. Available at: http://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-the-web?start=earliest&end=latest&view=list (Accessed: 10 June 2021)

[24] S. Jackson (2013) ‘Rethinking Repair’ in D. Gillespie Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, pp. 221–240.

[25] M. Kosec (2016) ‘The potential of ruins or the ruin of potential?’, Ruincarnations vol. 2.

[26] O. Lialina (2010) A Vernacular Web. Available at: http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular (Accessed: 05 August 2021)

[27] M. Liboiron (2018) ‘Waste colonialism’, Discard Studies. Available at: http://discardstudies.com/ 2018/11/01/waste-colonialism/ (Accessed: 10 August 2021)

[28] D. Linvega (2020) ‘A holistic approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture.’, XXIIVV wiki. Available at: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/ site/permacomputing.html (Accessed: 05 August 2021)

[29] J. Lyotard (1984) ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’, Artforum, 20:8. Available at: http://www. artforum.com/print/198404/the-sublime-and-the-avant-garde-32533 (Accessed: 13 August 2021)

[30] M. Marangoni (2020) Merciless Entropy. Available at: http://marianamarangoni.com/merciless_entropy.jpg (Accessed: 20 August 2021)

[31] S. Mattern (2015) ‘Deep Time of Media Infrastructure’. In L. Parks, & N. Starosielski (eds.) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

[32] R. Mazé (2007) Occupying Time: Design, technology, and the form of interaction. Stockholm: Axl Books.

[33] N. Montgomery (2013) ‘Summary: Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett’, Cultivating Alternatives. Available at: http://cultivatingalternatives.com/2013/11/28/summary-vibrant-matter-by-jane-bennett/ (Accessed: 20 August 2021)

[34] S. O’Sullivan (2016) ‘Myth-Science and the Fictioning of Reality’, Paragrana 25. Available at: http://www.academia.edu/19872052/Mythopoesis_and_the_Fictioning_of_Reality (Accessed: 05 August 2021)

[35] J. Parikka (2012) What is media archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press.

[36] J. Parikka (2014) The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[37] J. Parikka (2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[38] B. Raghavan (2015) ‘Abstraction, Indirection, and Sevareid’s Law: Towards Benign Computing’, ICSI. Available at: http://computingwithinlimits.org/2015/papers/limits2015-raghavan.pdf (Accessed: 05 August 2021)

[39] L. Ritasdatter (2020) Unwrapping COBOL: Lessons in Crisis Computing. Malmö: Malmö University.

[40] R. Schneider (2018) ‘Slough Media’, Remain.

[41] Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[42] P. Servigne and R. Stevens (2020) How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, Cambridge: Polity Press.

[43] B. Sterling (1995) ‘The DEAD MEDIA Project - A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal’, Dead Media Blog. Available at: http://www.deadmedia.org/ modest-proposal.html (Accessed: 05 August 2021)

[44] D. Trigg (2006) The aesthetics of decay. Bern: Peter Lang Press.

[45] L. Woods (2012) ‘Inevitable Architecture’. Lebbeus Woods Blog. Available at: http://lebbeuswoods. wordpress.com/2012/07/09/inevitable-architecture/ (Accessed: 12 August 2021)

[46] J. Zalasiewicz, M. Williams, C. Waters, A. Barnosky and P. Haff (2014) ‘The Technofossil Record of Humans.’ Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1: 34–43. Available at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/ 10.1177/2053019613514953?journalCode=anra (Accessed: 07 August 2021)

[47] S. Zielinski (2006) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Celebrating 65 years of The Computer Journal - free-to-read perspectives - bcs.org/tcj65