Olia Lialina talk (One Terabyte of a Kilobyte Age) - this thursday 16th

[Melooon]

Ten years of One Terabyte of a Kilobyte Age - Thursday 16th 2023

Rhizome arts group - "hosting a special office hours this week <3 ~ artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied will talk about their experience with One Terabyte of a Kilobyte Age - including different GeoCities design styles, a showcase of personal/ audience favorite sites, notable GeoCities users, and much more ~ on feb 16th at 2pm est"

Olia Lialina is one of the original net artists and a great inspiration to may people interested in the web revival - I highly recommend you drop into this talk!

You can register to see it with this google forum!

You can see a recording here:

[Onio]

ooh, ty for sharing! I signed up.

[Melooon]

I hope a few people will watch it and we can have a discussion here after! Also I love that their promo flyer is basically the MelonLand entrance page 

[dotmidi]

I hope a few people will watch it and we can have a discussion here after! Also I love that their promo flyer is basically the MelonLand entrance page 

I just signed up for it as well, I'm hoping I can catch it and then I'd totally be down to chat about it under this forum  

[TheFrugalGamer]

Sounds really neat, thanks for linking to it! I've signed up for it also. I'm kind of familiar with the Tumblr, but haven't dug through it that much, so it'll be fun to see them talk about their favorites.

[Melooon]

Ok so a few quick notes on the talk while they are fresh in my mind:

They were not into nostalgia at all, they didn't like the idea of geocities as an aesthetic, and they put a big emphasis on understanding the context of why things on geocities were the way they were. "Why was a gif used in the 90s and how was it different from gifs today".

This is a nice reminder for me, the web revival is not about nostalgia, its about creating something relevant to today - the reason many sites here look nostalgic is because casual html creates a particular kind of design, and becouse explorting the past is actually a current issue - we should not call basic html sites geocities-style sites, they are just basic html sites, fresh and current for any era as long as we use html!

They felt the context of a website was very important - e.g. an old website displayed on an old computer. They struggled with people not being able to accept the cultural contexts that have changed (e.g. some sites had material that was fine in the 90s but not acceptable today), and they tried to find a balance - they did not seem afraid of censoring or curating material for a modern audience.

They were also big supporters of ftp and the ability to freely access and control the physical files of your site - I actually thought while watching that it might be fun to make a MelonLand ftp server that's also a public site, e.g. a site that everyone can edit - that would be anarchy but very fun!

The talk seems to be available as a recording here! 

[TheFrugalGamer]

I missed the first part of the talk, so I'm glad they've put up a recording somewhere. It was interesting seeing the different perspective they have on the web revival stuff. They touched on a bit of that when someone asked what they thought about Neocities, and I couldn't quite grasp what they said...I think it was that they disliked how platform specific it is? It looked like they were advocating for more of a platform agnostic focus, which makes total sense, given what they're doing. The entirety of their project is as difficult as it is because it was hosted by one provider that went down at took everything with it.

One thing I thought was interesting was when they were discussing how the easiest way for them to share these sites is via screenshots, but that they definitely do have the full sites archived somewhere. I know there are a few projects around dedicated to archiving them, but I wonder if they'd be willing to share their collection, just to add one more into the mix?

[cinni]

for some reason i thought this was today!! gah. thanks for sharing the link, i'll have to give it a listen ^_^ i <3 olia's work.

One thing I thought was interesting was when they were discussing how the easiest way for them to share these sites is via screenshots, but that they definitely do have the full sites archived somewhere. I know there are a few projects around dedicated to archiving them, but I wonder if they'd be willing to share their collection, just to add one more into the mix?

Sorry if it was already mentioned, but I remember reading on their blog that they torrented the archive from the archive team, and I found a link here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/GeoCities_Torrent_Patch maybe this is helpful? 

[Melooon]

when someone asked what they thought about Neocities

That was me! (They answer at 1:14:50) In retrospect I feel like their answer was a bit dismissive of Neocities (They seemed to have an issue with IPFS.. Iv never figured out what that is..) - it gave me the impression that they don't interact with the web revival side of retro web stuff; so they were looking at it more as an aesthetic replication, than a desire to reclaim a spirit of web ownership.

That's maybe a little disappointing because I  really believe the aesthetics are a means to reclaim identity; although I totally agree some people never get past the nostalgia aspect. They also pitch shifted into disliking the web3 very fast, which again makes me think that they haven't had a lot of good experiences with the modern net

I'm not upset about any of that though; its fascinating to see such a deep perspective on the old web that's not coming from the typical web revival community point of view. We need that contrast, and its a really good chance to sanity check what we are doing and saying about the old web and what we want the web revival to be!