Welcome message by Prof. dr. Richard Rogers, chair of New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

Prof. Olia Lialina (Merz Akademie)

Collections

On the photo that accompanies this abstract you see me posing with my collection of early web manuals. Each of the books in turn contains its author’s collection of links to good or useful websites, many of which were collections themselves: of graphics, sounds, code, scripts and further URLs, where somebody else has already found what you were looking for. Collections were a cornerstone of the vernacular web. This environment was more about spirit than about skills, and to accumulate and distribute was no less important than to create. Making your own site and building collections was often a parallel process. Because of the modular structure of web pages, even sites that never contained a collection section were, in themselves, collections, since each of their elements had its own URL and could easily be singled out and extracted. Still, some web masters made collecting the main purpose of their web site.

This talk will highlight the earliest known collections: Alan and Lucy Richmond Graphic Resources, Randy’s Icon Bazaar, the first Gallery of pureGIF animations started by Royal Frazier, Netscape’s animated GIFs, and BHI graphics. I address the role of these and other collections, and the subsequent transition from collections of items to sample pages, sets, and templates. Let’s wander through Sonya Marvel Creations, Mardi Wetmore’s Graphics on Budget, Moon and Back sets; look at the heritage left by GeoBuilder, Intel’s Web Page Wizard, Front Page, Yahoo Page Builder, and their templates. The GeoCities Research Institute archive and library provide quite some evidence to understand the logic, structure, and evolution of materials and tools available to web amateurs of the medium’s first decade. However, most of the time we deal with fragments, splinters, and web masters’ voluntarism. Creating our own collections helps to complete the picture.

Prof. Fred Turner (Stanford University)

Machine Politics: The Rise of the Internet and a New Age of Authoritarianism

In 1989, as Tim Berners-Lee dreamed up the World Wide Web, a deep faith in the democratizing power of decentralized communication ruled American life. Even Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator of the Hollywood era, could be heard to proclaim that “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the micro-chip.” Today of course, we know better. The question is, how did we go so far wrong? To try to answer that question, this talk returns to the 1940s and shows how our trust in decentralized communication was born in the fight against fascism during World War II. It then tracks that trust through the counterculture of the 1960s to the Silicon Valley of today. Along the way, it shows step-by-step how the twentieth-century American dream of a society of technology-equipped, expressive individuals became the foundation of today’s newly emboldened and highly individualized form of authoritarianism.

Prof. Wendy Chun (Simon Fraser University)

Exit: The Web that Remains

This talk questions nostalgia regarding the web that was by tracing the links between 1990s visions of "cyberspace" and today's embrace of AI. Both seek to solve political problems technologically through promises of an impossibly autonomous sovereignty.

Respondent: Florian Cramer (Willem de Kooning Academy)

Dr. Megan Sapnar Ankerson (University of Michigan)

Zombies, Robots and Time Machines: Improbable Histories of the World Wide Web

What is “the web that was”? In important ways, the question is an invitation to reimagine what it means to do web history and think historically about networked algorithmically-generated records more broadly. Born-digital archives encountered through platforms like the Wayback Machine and Google Streetview are important objects to think with about the epistemologies, temporalities, and lived experiences of a digitally networked archived life: they are material-semiotic sites through which we encounter history anew. While the “material turn” has inspired research into the infrastructural, algorithmic and programmable aspects of digital platforms, surging interest in materiality has come at the expense of critical attention to the semiotic dimensions of sociotechnical systems. This talk therefore turns to the “tropic” role of language in order to probe the tensions and contradictions that trouble categories of truth, knowledge and evidence in the digital era. Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway’s famous figure of the cyborg in modern technoscience, I turn to three figures that can be found lurking in the technical documentation of web archives: zombies, robots, and time machines. These figures emerge in these documents not for fictional or dramatic purposes, but as a way to help explain the uncanny temporalities encountered in the process of archiving the “live web.” More than just colorful metaphors that infuse geek culture, I approach these figurations as material-semiotic nodes that register interference patterns in the archival epistemologies of modernity. Zombies, robots and time machines trouble distinctions between past and future, archived and live, automated and human, and in doing, they direct us towards the political work and queer potential of grappling with “improbable artifacts,” historical records that challenge the categories and schemas put in place in the creation of modern archival systems and principles in the 19th century. Recognizing the queer potential of web archives, I suggest, is an opportunity to harness different perspectives on “what was” and what “will be” in order to read against the grain of algorithmic logics of probability and prediction.

Kevin Driscoll (University of Virginia), Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo), Valérie Schafer (University of Luxemburg), Jane Winters (University of London) 

Panel members will lead a discussion of key issues raised during the conference and reflect on future directions for the field.

Prof. Niels Brügger (Aarhus University) will lead a closing session and discuss the future of RESAW including upcoming conferences.