I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to draw attention both to the manual labour involved in the composition of web pages, and the functioning of the web page itself as a 'manual', a 'handbook', a set of instructions required for a computer program to run.
For most of its history web pages have been read on desktop or laptop computers. Readers have had the option of right-clicking on any page, selecting View Page Source, copying, pasting, and re-writing the source code. In this manner, readers become writers.
In February 2015, Matthew Rothberg created a website called Unindexed which continuously searched Google for itself. It survived for 22 days before being indexed, at which point it was permanently deleted. Rothberg has since shared the source code on GitHub, so you too can create a website which self-destructs the moment Google indexes it.
Dozens of readers have re-written the source code of Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge (2008). For many, this was their first experience 'making' a computer-generated text.
I have rewritten Taroko Gorge three times. Further to the close relation between the handmade web and ephemeral print materials, excerpts of output and source code from the first iteration, Gorge (2010), were published in my very small press print book GENERATION[S] (2010), which, I believe, is now only available as a PDF. Gorge is a never-ending tract of computer-generated text spewing verse approximations, poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence, and desire.
I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to draw attention to the physical body.
Consider the manual labour carried out by the mouse hand in Daniel Eatock's The One Mile Scroll (2008) A few entries appear at the top of the screen - Denver, The Mile High City - my grandfather’s grave, Denver - after that we scroll and scroll. The hand is made to work. Through the labour of the body the virtual space of the browser window is transformed into an actual, physical distance.
Ironically, handheld devices have distanced us from the handmade web. In Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (2014), Lori Emerson argues: "The iPad works because users can’t know how it works" (15). Reading the web on an iPhone, iPad, or similar device, readers do not have the option of viewing the page source. The iPad provides consumers with access to materials created by others, but cannot easily be used as a tool in the handcrafting of new materials.
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I love this analogy, too bad it's not leading as a read thread throughout the argument
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Very playful, makes me think of degenerative, a website that erases it own content
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----> Last registered on the Wayback Machine: 15 Feb. 2015
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----> idem
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This is crafting, doing and re-doing, out of passion and thirst for improvement, as well as the adrenaline of the experimentation
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----> How it looked 2 months before Carpenter published her text: 08 Jan. 2015
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I tag this into #handcoded because it's the perfect representation of its absolute opposite
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I wish it went deeper into the metaphor, the examples she gives are interesting but seem like they could be more developed or questioned. Some projects go in this direction like cyberwitches, to reunite body and virtual. It was written in 2015, the cyberpunk and dystopian tech future stories were there, even in the 1990s actually so why not address the subject more???
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Where is the manual labour here? Develop arguments as we develop websites!
----> dead link
----> dead link
----> dead link
This is great but too short! What about other examples of body interaction?