Digital Archeology in The Deleted City: Historicizing Geocities

by Christina Spiker, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

Although SOPA and PIPA have been taken off the table, it has become increasingly important to examine digital histories of user-created content on the web, especially as that content faces the threat of censorship and moderation.  While there was a nostalgic part of me that smiled when I stumbled upon The Deleted City project, there also seems to be an immediate need to reevaluate these kinds of digital, generative spaces such as the late Geocities and other early online communities.  According to the project's website,

The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free webhosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighbourhood based on the subject of your homepage... Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of "homesteaders" as the digital tennants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars.  Ten years later, in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and delted.  In a heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down.  The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

As an exercise in media archeology, The Deleted City project visualizes the archive of personal websites cataloged immediately before the deletion of Geocities on October 27, 2009.  This installation work visualizes the data of the archive as a city map, spatially arranging the "neighborhoods" based on file quantities.  The website explains, "In full view, the map is a datavisualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighborhoods.  While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing individual html pages and the images they contain.  While browsing, nearby MIDI files are played."  In their visualization of digital space, The Deleted City simultaneously embraces the communitarian aspect of Geocities (and dated artifacts such as the MIDI sound file) alongside new touch technology that allows us to point, swipe, and pinch our way through the neighborhoods of internet past. The Deleted City visualizes Geocities in a way intended for the gallery.  Does something become truly past once it passes into the realm of the museum?

My own history on Geocities seems like a distant memory.  After playing around with several other free website hosts, I navigated my way there in order to create an account in the digital neighborhood of SoHo (one of the "cities" dedicated to the arts).  My page started with a default template that soon became littered with tacky animated GIF files and a variety of MIDI songs that changed with my adolescent mood.  It housed poetry from junior high and artwork from my freshman year -- all before my own awareness of things like internet piracy and creative commons.  My barebones website encouraged me to experiment with HTML (first with "free layouts" offered by more experienced web masters and later by layouts created by my own hand).  However, Geocities also introduced me to new kinds of interaction through their interest-based communities and the glorious invention called the "webring" used to discover new sites of similar topics (a rudimentary StumbleUpon, if you will).  For me, Geocities and the phenomenon of the personal website so popular in the 1990s, prefaced much of my engagement with the internet as a space of creative possibility.  However, when Geocities faced its immanent deletion, I had already said my goodbyes and, like many of my peers, moved on to the thrill of domain ownership and social networking. My "homestead" stood vacant among many others when the plug was finally pulled.

Despite my nostalgic attachment to Geocities, its existence testifies to the life (and death) of a particular venue for user-created web content.  It forces us to consider the preservation of digital material, and, in some senses, digital world and community making.  There is a certain kind of utopic idealism that these spaces seem to enjoy and embrace. However permanent a fixture Geocities seemed to be during its height, it makes us cognizant of the eventual passing of other platforms and the impermanence of the content created on them.  In light of current news, it also forces us to consider the value of those spaces should they one day disappear.

The Deleted City from deletedcity on Vimeo.

Enari Tsuneo Exhibition: “Japan and Its Forgotten War: Showa”

by Christina Spiker, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

Mount Suribachi and Minami Beach, Iwo Jima, the Ogasawara Islands, June, 2009It is amazing how the sublime beauty of ruin can mask the gratuitous violence of war.  Nowhere is this more apparent than Enari Tsuneo’s retrospective exhibition, “Japan and Its Forgotten War: Showa” (昭和史のかたち) currently on display at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography until September 25th, 2011. The exhibit features 112 of Enari’s photographs over his forty-year career, including several previously unpublished works from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Upon entering, one is greeted with delicate petals floating on swirling, psychedelic swatches of color.  Taken at the site where the U.S.S. Arizona met its watery tomb at Pearl Harbor, the saturated photograph simultaneously supports and denies such history.  Oil from the wreckage of the ship still rises to the surface, and although they have been called “black tears,” the term seems ill equipped to describe the mesmerizing dance of oil on water. 

However, the filmy surface of oil on water seems to be a metaphor well suited for Enari’s project of trying to use surface to investigate depth.  The exhibit is divided into five parts each exploring a different aspect of the vestiges of war: Islands of Wailing Ghosts, False Manchukuo, The Children’s Manchukuo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  The photograph described above belongs to Islands of Wailing Ghosts, which features the various islands that compromised the Pacific theater.  The battered terrain of these small islands on which the war was fought is often neglected in favor of a narrative of “good” versus “evil.” But the relics of war lay undisturbed, covered in vegetation.  Many Japanese soldiers died on these islands from starvation and exposure, but the “wailing ghosts” that Enari evokes can only be found beneath the sleepy tranquility of quiet beaches and the cheerful blooms of hibiscus and bougainvillea.

Moving away from these islands, False Manchukuo and the Children’s Manchukuo address the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the northeastern part of China.  We see the failed attempts at recreating Japan in abandoned torii gates and factories—the last vestiges of an imperial project.  The landscape seems to find a parallel in the worn faces of Japanese children (now adults) abandoned by their parents that appear on the opposing wall.

LEFT: Numata Suzuko (then 21) August, 2009 RIGHT: Scorched Soap. In the collection of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (donated by Sawai Michiko). April, 2010.However, the final part of the exhibition that focuses on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is Enari’s most successful attempt at juxtaposing surfaces in order to invoke unspeakable horror.  The faces of hibakusha are placed next to relics of the bombs—mangled and melted glass, broken clocks, battered concrete.  Printed in a large format, the velvety quality of each image allows one to see these faces as surface.  Each wrinkle and contour is visible and serves as a roadmap of experience.  The twisted bottles fused together from the heat of the bomb stand in for the ghosts of friends and family, while the facial features attest to the strength of human endurance and the pain of survival.

An exercise in revisionist history, Enari Tsuneo’s exhibit is ultimately one of reflection and meditation on the ephemerality of war and memory.  As the vines threaten to overcome abandoned aircraft, and age threatens to overcome survivors, it is important to question how the Showa war will be remembered after the physical traces have disappeared.

Exhibition Website: English | Japanese 8V59H7ANZ6T3

A Vocabulary of Disaster: Reflecting on the Tsunami

by Christina Spiker, University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies

When disasters are upon us, we always seem to recall the exact moment of first awareness. My mother can remember exactly where she was when JFK was shot. I was sitting in my high school government class watching political debates when the program was interrupted with news of the World Trade Center.  When the earthquake occurred off the shore of Sendai, Japan, I was sitting on my couch entertaining guests when a dire phone call urged me to turn on my TV. There is something about these types of events that compels us to watch and listen.

The media blitz was relentless with their confrontation of professional aerial views, shoddy cell-phone videos, disembodied voice clips, and still shots of what I can only describe as the sublime incomprehensibility of Mother Nature.  In the US media, every English-speaking person in range of a newscaster was interviewed with an intense desire to make the event comprehensible to our eyes and ears.  Our mouths dropped with horror, we opened our purses, and desperately tried to make sure friends and loved ones were safe and sound.  Relief organizations beckoned and, here at the University of California Irvine, small student organizations solicited with their lemonade stands and donation benefits.  Even for those of us who have previously spent extended periods of time in Japan, the disaster continues to be legible to us only through images, clips, and status updates. 

For me, two images remain imprinted on my mind: the first is a video of the effortless way that the deluge of water proceeded six miles inland, and another is an image taken from a helicopter of a family waving white pieces of fabric from the second story of their submerged home.  Our experience of disaster is fragmentary.  But, as the media coverage dies down, we start to see the codification of its representation.  A few select “images”—visual and otherwise—come to stand in for our remote experience.  Ten years from now, will that family waving their makeshift white flag be remembered?  Or will another image (or set of images) emerge to represent that which is too big, too traumatic to find representation?

The visualizing of disaster is a topic worthy of meditation, especially during these trying times.  How do we communicate disaster?  What are the politics of such communication? With the Japanese disaster, the intense disparity between media outlets also forces us to question notions of reliability, authenticity, and photographic veracity.  What are the ethics of representing disaster and when do ethics cross the line into exploitation?

(EDIT: A friend, Canon Purdy, who is living in Miyagi prefecture just shared this video of the tsunami taken by one of her highschool students.  It is difficult to watch, but at the same time lends itself to a different perspective of the event.  The tsunami is clearly visible around the 2 minute mark.  Link to Video)