Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenscheid are artists. Both also teach, at the German Merz Akademie. As editors of the 3-in-1 Digital Folklore Reader (student's reader, monograph and catalogue) they combine both qualities. The book comes with nice thought- and playful, as well as functional, design by Manuel Bürger.
Olia and Dragan have a longstanding interest in the web as it (once) was, in its long ago 'pre-social network' days: users were not yet inflating Facebook's globe-spanning network with personal data to be among 'friends', with their each and every move being monitored and cross-referenced by script-laden pages and dozens of cookies. In the old days users copy-pasted simple lines of HTML code into rudimentary templates provided by a free hosting service, like Geocities. They made a Personal Homepage and shared their love for breeding rabbits. Or another among trillions of possible passions. Many of these pages came illustrated with the same animated gif's (available from dedicated sites), had a similar starry or other repeating background, text in colored Comic Sans, a welcoming MIDI tune and many a section that would remain Under Construction until the day the service foundered...
Digital Folklore inspired me to try and relive some of the old web. I remade my very first pages from the mid 1990s (using paper printouts as a model), dug up Rina's Homepage (a bit of web-folklore from 1999), had a look at Wired.com's Geocities pages collection, my own 2002 site's homepage...
Though of course the 'old' stuff still looks the way it did back then, viewing it in an up-to-date browser on the wide screen of a recent laptop, wirelessly connected to broadband internet is an experience very different from the original one: waiting for such pages to drip into Netscape 4 or an early version of IE, on the small square bulky screen of a PowerPC running MacOS 7.5, or a PC doing Windows 95 or 98 via an ethernet cable connected to a telephone modem.
That must be why this paper book, somewhat to my surprise, invokes some of the essence of the feel of that bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction web now far better than a website with archived and/or re-built old pages could.
[ Digital Folklore. To computer users, with love and respect. Olia Lialina, Dragan Espenschied (ed.) Merz & Solitude, 2009. 288p. ISBN: 9 783937 982255 ]
