Why low res??
This is for multiple reasons. First of all, the technology during the time could not support high quality images, nor could it produce such. The average memory of the first computer is in KB. However, from the beginning of using computers to create imagery, the aesthetic of the pixel was embraced.

What do you mean by static pages?
This means that the webpage or pages exist as their HTML file commands them to. This website is an example of static HTML. The opposite, which is a dynamic HTML page, uses code such as PHP that is interactive with the user, and can even store data from those interactions, or react to the user's interactions. An example of this would be

How is "personal content" different than the tumblr's of today?
Tumblr is technically social media, and in reality, is used to repost others' content rather than producing your own. Tumblr culture is about sharing things that are not your own, communicating through the website directly and privately to others, and being able to comment on content.

Early websites were personal spaces that people could use to express themselves in any way, usually with their own content. It never was a comptetitive thing, no one really cared how many views their webpage had over someone else's, and communication was not user-to-user. More on social context of early web here .

How was it less formal?
A very simple way of saying it is that websites' standard for "professional" was very low, and/or non-existent. If you had a website for your own business, it might be the same aesthetic/design quality as a Neopets page, or someone's online (personal) journal. Because the standard of design was so low, there was no quality hierarchy, and no one could criticize bad web design because they didn't know what looked better.

Web 1.0 was the first era of the Internet and began in the early 1990's. It was before social media & CSS, and only used static HTML . These webpages consisted of only hyperlinks and plain text, and images, and were usually not very interactive.

This was also during the time when search engines were beginning to develop. Because search engines were not yet capitalized as they are now, search results were much more fair and diverse. For instance, if you searched "dogs", you were likely not to find a Wikipedia article, or an Animal Planet website; but instead you would find a wacky site with dog gifs everywhere. This was also before Google became popular and AOL during this time was actually the most popular web browser.

Web 1.0 design is pretty recognizable. It began with one column layouts, but in a few years, more and more people were learning how to code tables, which allowed for multiple column layouts. This shows that a lot of early web design looks so primitive not because the designers were bad, but because everyone was just then figuring out code. Another reason is that designers at this time considered pixel and low res imaging (with horrible color schemes and all) to be advanced. Therefore, the priority of the time wasn't to make good design, it was to make a tech savy/futuristic site.

As it developed, Web 1.0 became more visually dense. In the mid 1990's, animated text became popular, and background images were a must. Code and webhosting sites were becoming more and more accessible. It advanced again in the late 1990's when Flash was a popular medium to use for design, animation, and games.

The cut off between Web 1.0 and 2.0 is a little vague, but we consider the start of Web 2.0 to be in the early 2000's when CSS was first introduced, Javascript was born, and when dynamic HTML was extremely common. Another cut off time would be in the late 2000's when web aesthetic began to change dramatically. Also, spoilers: we're still in Web 2.0. This era of the Internet stretches over a very long period of time, and the design styles within W2.0 widely vary.

Imaging began to be treated differently when the look of the pixel became outdated. Software advancements allowed for production and handling of higher quality images. Designers were a little too obsessed with gradients and making graphics look glossy because there media had new potential and created a new visual language. A plethora of new processing and coding technologies made better design layouts possible, with implementation of drop-down menus and more interactive/dynamic pages.

This was also a time when the Internet became an increasingly popular field of investment. Certain websites were gaining more popularity than others, and webpage traffic began to streamline towards those websites and away from the more obscure and personal ones. As time progressed, gradients, gloss, and blue-grey color-schemes began to transform into flat colors, minimalism, abstraction, and bright colors. Social media and online shopping are dominating the digital market, and you pay to be more accessible on search engines. Websites are almost always optimized for mobile screens, and web-building code is growing more and more complex.

The definition of when Web 3.0 begins is very vague, because we are either about to step into it, or have just gotten our feet wet in this era. Cloud storage is a major innovation that is attributed to Web 3.0, as well as communal data and networking, and being able to connect with others with ease. The increased amount of “smart devices” or everyday machinery that is compatible with the Internet is also considered an attribute of this era. While development of the semantic web started in the mid 2000’s, it has yet to be done successfully; Web 3.0 is expected to be the era that does it successfully. Semantic web is a design movement that is attempts to make webpages as easy to interpret for machines as they are for humans. For example, Siri being able to browse Facebook by itself.

Net.art was made during 1990-2000's, and used the computer and the Internet as artistic media. The aesthetic is very similar to today's glitch art, though it feels almost more analogue. It is unique in a way that film cameras are to us: with newer technology, we can imitate the old, but it will never be quite the same. They really were inventive of using a medium that now seems so primitive to us, even using hyperlinks to act as typography, or using a webpage as a place for a speculative space.

A lot of well known net artists were also very conceptual and aware of the culture in the art world. They were not making web art because it was trendy, they were truly using it as a legitimate medium to explore dense concepts, like in this piece. A lot of them also explored hacker culture, which was the way in which to abuse or re-work technology in a creative way, or to create an intellectual challenge. This is different from what you know as "hackers", because these people use their skills for fun and not evil.

Art that is inspired by EDM and utilizes glitch art, Renaissance sculptures, early web design, old computer monitors, and cyberpunk aesthetic.

"Vaporwave focuses on the nostalgia of the '80s and '90s simply to create a soothing, hypnotic appearance and elicit an emotional undertone, or to be left intentionally emotionless, a large portion of Vaporwave music and aesthetic continues to give off a Warhol-esque critique on uber-consumerist society via a separation of product and commercialization."

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*his most recent work*


How did your exposure to tech and early Internet impact your work?

This is a very broad question.
I guess I can answer it by talking about the aspects of early Internet images and my personal stance to them. In my opinion, interestingly, earlier Internet images are very similar to kinetoscope--the beginning of private cinema, invented by Thomas Edison. In Kinetoscope, viewers looks into a black box, isolating himself/herself in his own vision but still exposing his/her body to the public. And inside the black box, the viewer can see clips of short looping silent videos.

Kinetoscope shares some similarities with gifs (GIF IMAGE)--the foundation of web 1.0 and personal websites. Gifs are also short, looped, and soundless motion images, they are presented on a screen that is private--the screen of a computer. But at the same time, they are also being viewed in a place that is semi-public, or trans-individual as I described in my thesis argument. We share our emotions, bodies, fetish desires, outsider arts, forbidden fantasies, and many other moodboard-like screenshots--as the highly subjective pieces--with others, in the open public space as the Internet, but with identity masks.

So, these aspects I have just talked about, especially the presence of motion, looping, over-liveliness, trans-individual, semi-public, subjectivity with masks, and misused ambiguities, become the method and pattern of narratives in my work. They also become something that is beyond a gesture of visual, as a way of framing things, a way of investigating digital identities and bodies.

How does this early tech/digital aesthetic function when trying to communicate in a piece?

They help me to create what I consider as the ecstatic surfaces in my works: nothing is silent, still; everything is in a state of happening, looping, communicating and glitching. They all combined to create the plastic images of ourselves. If you have seen my works (listed above), you can notice that they function in a way inspired by the early internet and video game narratives: featuring the transitional, transformative and malleable relationships between image and text, and a mixed perspective between me being myself and seeing myself from a introspective. This unstable relationship of image and text--combined with the broken hierarchies and a departure from static surfaces--defines my works, and it creates the ecstatic surfaces that is visually and structurally connected to early and current web arts.

4 further reading

Can you describe for us, what your creative process is like?

I am a visual-oriented person, with research-based backups. I create work under circumstances of urgencies, like an impulse of an imagery, a burst of emotions, a situational melancholy from listening to musics, a discovery of in-game secrets… I record, visualize and develop these instances, to create a body of work, as a body forever under construction. Then I will re-interpret and curate this body later, and connect it with the readings and other researches that I am also working on. It is hard for me to tell whether I am working or not at a certain time, I am always constantly switching between working and not working, to create things in transitional spaces. For example, at a moment I can be playing a video game, then suddenly I realize what I am playing have interesting metaphorical values, then I will record it and later re-approach it as a piece of work in process.

What were your most frequently visited websites growing up?

(I am not growing up in the U.S., so some are websites that I actually use, while some others are the ones that have similar functions)

A sanctuary for mood boards, stories and emotions
I frequently visit websites like:
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A place for fandom, anonymous arts and trash-talks
In some way, miiverse is more immersive that devaintart, I think, as it only allow black and white drawings, so it is only about the stories and the instant states of the characters themselves, without other over decorations from the users.

A more NSFW-oriented trash-talk place, and interesting at the same time

Looking for image-based stories of nonsenses and montages? Here

A place to waste time, but with sudden poetic inserts

Video websites, such as Youtube and the copies;

Grooveshark, a website that is already out of business. This is a website for user-based music sharing, perfect for playing in the background when browsing Tumblr. So you can put in the currently alive one: Spotify.

The places for internet-based aesthetics, especially glow texts and emulators for games, like here and here

Do you think that this early digital aesthetic that makes people nostalgic now, will shift as time goes on?

Yes and no. Early Internet aesthetics are being re-interpret and misused now, within and beyond visual arts. We can see this in seapunk, and its more influential descendant: v a p o r w a v e. Now, vaporwave is essentially a multi-media approach of Internet art movement, having images, musics, prints and sculptures. It started from glitched gifs from a 90s SEGA game about dolphins, and re-mixed 90s commercial video clips. And then it quickly expands to other medias and a way broader range of subjectivities, using videos, video games, sculptures and many other mixed-media approaches. The current vaporwave, and many other reused low-fi aesthetics are no longer only about the 90s, but also about using the 90s' features to talk about ourselves and the world in this contemporary media-saturated, dazzling and overwhelming environment.
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So we can see, nostalgia is just one of the reasons for people to pick up old things, but fundamentally, it is for the urgency of expression and re-interpretation, as responses to our current state of existence. So I will say, these reused early Internet aesthetics will certainly shift as time goes on; but people did not--and will always not--choose them out of solely nostalgic reasons.

There wasn't only an aesthetic difference in the early web, but there was also a different social atmosphere. The early web was not dominated by corporations or capitalism, so a lot of the content was usually free for use; it was also much easier to get discovered since everyone was starting at square one. There was also an encouragement to learn and use HTML/CSS, so a lot of websites were really open to showing how they were built, unlike now where code has become much more cryptic, and some designers even make an effort to hide their code. This was also before "trolling" came to fruition, so a lot of interactions with people were a lot more friendly.