The Endangered Web Art of the Nineties and Aughts

Miltos Manetas, Jesus Swimming, 2001. Image via the New York Times.

The history of books bound in human skin is tied, as so many terrifying things are, to the history of medicine. As Megan Rosenbloom writes, doctors in eighteenth-century France had a nasty habit of serving as arms of the state: “Doctors sometimes removed the skins of infamous murderers and used them to bind books about their deeds—a fact well known enough to serve as a kind of deterrent … The increase in the number of patients doctors saw regularly gave them a greater body of clinical experience to draw upon, but it also pulled focus away from individual patients, their stories, and how those stories shaped the clinical encounter. Michel Foucault wrote in The Birth of the Clinic that this structure led to the development of the clinical gaze, where diagnostic science and stresses of the job contributed to doctors viewing patients as disembodied symptoms, diseases, and organs instead of as fellow human beings. The book bound in human skin could serve as an example of that tendency. Patients’ skins became raw material for binding a doctor’s prized books instead of the thin membrane between a human’s internal workings and the outside world—an erasure of individuals with families and inalienable rights.”

As a fan of early web art, I browse the Internet exclusively on a 1996 Packard Bell PC running Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator 2.0, thus guaranteeing that I see these works as their artists intended them to be seen. But evolving software and infrastructure is making it harder and harder to preserve the web art of the nineties and aughts—so much so that an ambitious archival project is in order. Frank Rose writes, “In the early days of the web, art was frequently a cause and the internet was an alternate universe in which to pursue it. Two decades later, preserving this work has become a mission. As web browsers and computer operating systems stopped supporting the software tools they were built with, many works have fallen victim to digital obsolescence. Later ones have been victims of arbitrary decisions by proprietary internet platforms—as when YouTube deleted Petra Cortright’s video ‘VVEBCAM’ on the grounds that it violated the site’s community guidelines. Even the drip paintings Jackson Pollock made with house paint have fared better than art made by manipulating electrons.”

In which Henry James waxes rhapsodic about apple trees: “The apple tree in New England plays the part of the olive in Italy, charges itself with the effect of detail, for the most part otherwise too scantly produced, and, engaged in this charming care, becomes infinitely decorative and delicate. What it must do for the too under-dressed land in May and June is easily supposable; but its office in the early autumn is to scatter coral and gold. The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old clearing, an orchard. You pick them up from under your feet but to bite into them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of strange-colored pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you notice their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gayety, they seem to ask to be praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe.”

Handwriting is probably more fetishized in 2016 than it’s ever been; we treasure the supposed intimacy of cursive so much that we forget the disdain that used to come with it. Mark Oppenheimer writes, “I can’t escape the conviction that cursive—writing it and knowing how to read it—represents some universal value … This is sheer nonsense, of course. My preference is just one bit of residual snobbery in a long tradition of residual snobbery. There have been cursive scripts, created for speedier writing, at least since the Egyptian hand that the Greeks called ‘demotic’ … From the beginning, people have attached judgments to different scripts, and people’s proficiency in them. Because handwriting was labor, the work of monks or hired scribes, it used to be something that the status-conscious made sure not to do too well.”

Good news for academics: your writing days are over. Why bother to generate page after page of abstruse theorizing for consumption by a dwindling group of your peers? Just get your phone to do it instead. A New Zealand professor had his paper accepted by the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics; he’d written it entirely with iOS’s autocomplete function. And it goes like this: “The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids … Power is not a great place for a good time.”

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