Digging through the Geocities Torrent. We live in a world where people say “GIF”, but mean “Animated GIF”.
In the 1990′s, and during the first years of the new century — or lets say before this format’s glorious comeback — there were two genres: GIFs and Animated GIFs. There were collections of GIFs and Animated GIFs, there were famous GIFs and famous Animated GIFs. I was reminded about it by the welcome message on the Sailormars Transparent GIF page. One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op. Geocities - The Torrent. Geocities Archive Data Turned Into a Stunning Digital City. An Introduction to the Early Web Aesthetics of Geocities. You might know Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied as internet artists, or more specifically, as internet archaeologists.
The duo have made a practice of plumbing the depths of internet culture, dusting off old memes and spelunking in old corners of the web. The obscure nature of their work makes their Tumblr, “One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age” (and their blog of the same name), all the more welcome. The Tumblr, which seems to post extremely often, near the site’s posting limit, collects screenshots from various homepages the duo have found in the Geocities Torrent, a 652-gigabyte file cache of outdated Geocities pages, which Yahoo took offline in 2009. It’s a treasure trove of outdated aesthetics, web design tropes, and apologies for not posting more or not having the site cleaned up. Geocities-izer - Make Any Webpage Look Like It Was Made By A 13 Year-Old In 1996.