AHH16
Olia Lialina, Give Me Time / This Page is No More, 2015–ongoing
Synchronized slide projections
Courtesy the artist
Give Me Time / This Page is No More documents two phases in the life cycle of websites on the now-defunct GeoCities.com, one of the most popular hosting services on the early web. In this diptych, one projection features screenshots of pages that promise further development; the other displays screenshots of pages announcing that they have been abandoned.
The work emerges from a long-term research project, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2010–ongoing) by Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, that is centered around the preservation and restoration of GeoCities websites. Founded in 1994, GeoCities offered users free hosting for their own web pages in exchange for serving banner ads to all visitors, and quickly became the early internet’s agora of vernacular design. Purchased by Yahoo! in 1999, the platform was shuttered in 2009, with users receiving little or no notice before their pages were taken down. Archive Team, a volunteer brigade of archivists led by Jason Scott, managed to mitigate this act of cultural destruction by rescuing nearly a terabyte of GeoCities pages prior to the shutdown and sharing the data as a torrent.
Lialina and Espenschied began working with the GeoCities archive as part of their reconsideration of the cultural value of “digital folklore,” the amateur web practices that make up a significant but much- derided part of internet culture. The care with which Lialina and Espenschied treat such artifacts in terms of technical restoration and contextual research belies their seeming frivolousness, emphasizing the underlying dignity common to all kinds of folk art.
The slide projectors emit noticeable sound from their cooling fans, there is rattling when the carousel progresses to the next pair of slides every 12 seconds.
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Image size needs to be minimum 3.5' apart with a comfortable margin between. Cabling and slide synch unit should be hidden inside pedestal. Cable needs to run from sync unit to each projector using the soldered, integrated splitter.
Slide projectors x 2 Slide carousels x 2 with slides Spare slides Slide synch unit with soldered splitter
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Two matching pedestals, ideally about 4' tall, painted to match wall color
Sync unit wiring is somewhat overcomplicated. See this diagram in case rewiring needs to be attempted. Note: check connections with a continuity meter before undoing existing solders.
