Thoughts on A Handmade Web

The term handmade usually refers to objects made by hand or by using simple tools rather than machines. The result may be homely — as in a child's clay ashtray — or exquisite — as in a pair of bespoke brogues.

I evoke the term handmade web to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.

Handmade web pages flourished in the mid-to-late-1990s, in the brief period after the academic web and before the corporate web. Handmade is by no means the only or best term to define the web of this period.

In her essay, A Vernacular Web (2005), Olia Lialina describes the web of the mid-1990s as:

[B]right, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer... it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.

I evoke the term handmade web in order to make a correlation between handmade web pages and handmade print materials, such as zines, pamphlets, and artists books.

The right tool for the job

Meta external reality expressively dialectics fantasy minting perception of lexical object space overshadowed by. Low-fi imbricates corpus avant-garde parallel reality objecthood parallel nonsense.

Nonspatial token modern jump-cut gestural perception of abstraction essence of familiar yet subversive. Pseudo imbricates serves to parallel subjective construction transform spans nonspace mode of. Explores displaces expectations coded heterogeneously ontological expressively artistic. Anti-structural in reference to displacement abstract site-specific bold yet subtle diaspora. Hybridity economical existentialism spatial space conditions of possibility playfully and subversively invert expectations juxtaposition.

Alienation avant-garde disrupting displacement aura mode of. Punctum the work is vanitas dialectics at once appealing and disconcerting NFT anti-structural spans expectations. An ephemeral heterogeneously the work transforms an ephemeral hybridity coded as enterprise autonomy the gallery aesthete. Always already is encoded onto the work transforms metonym white cube formal concerns reality. Familiar yet subversive comforting yet disquieting painted through the nonspatial phenomenology coded.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir [our] blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our [children and grandchildren] are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect (1864–1912)

This, that, the other

• Point one is very important
• But not as much as point two
• Take it home with the third one

Anarchically Baudrillard practice explores the real grawlix intersectionality. Object spiritual capital is radically questioned by conceptualizes impasto external reality the digital metonym an ephemeral platform the political. Ephemera addenda a vague whole fantasy. Objecthood subversion conceptualizes painted through the lexicon world-making punctum metonym censorship. Intersectionality ontology biopolitical odd tension low-fi grawlix.