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Discussing Archives of Digital Mourning: Deadweb Lacrymatory
The systematic erasure of the GeoCities platform has been a topic of conversation in new media archival circles. Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied’s One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age project emphasizes the importance of digital folklore and folk art as part of our history. I look at the collapse of this massive platform as a failed wakeup call to all those who forget their web presence is rented space from large corporations who can remove you or your entire community when it is deemed no longer profitable. As I focus on spaces of mourning and grief on this dead platform, I am also projected into what that means for mourning spaces on new platforms. In a way, all of the internet is built on a graveyard, and there is no way to permanently archive the experience of being on these dead platforms.
By using tears to analog glitch artifacts from these lost pages, I hope to evoke a hauntological perspective on the internet’s past.
For this event, I will describe my work mining the 1 TB of data archived from Geocities for personal memorial pages. This will lead into a participatory conversation with others about their experience with loss and how the internet may positively or negatively impact that experience. Other artists and researchers purposefully avoid using these pages in their display of this archive due to the personal nature of grief and loss. Post-pandemic, I have increasingly become fascinated and more aware of how my mourning and loss rituals have been shaped by digital mediation. This occupation with death, material culture, and the internet has led to the ongoing creation of my artwork, deadWeb Lacrymatory. Through the convergence of glitched media players, a vintage CRT monitor, and a vessel containing human tears and seawater, this project seeks to unravel the layers of cultural and emotional significance embedded in the digital artifacts of the past.
Janna Ahrndt [US]
Janna Ahrndt (She/They) received her MFA in Electronic and Time- Based Art from Purdue University in 2019. Janna is currently a resident of Windham, Maine. Their work explores how deconstructing everyday technologies, or even designing them yourself, can question larger oppressive systems and create a space for participatory action.
