Gallery

404 (Still Life)

Mixed Media · 2023 · Various

Curator’s Note

A still life of things that no longer exist on the internet. Every element in this piece was once a real webpage, a real community, a real corner of the web that someone loved. Now they all return 404.

404 (Still Life) is a mixed-media piece assembled from screenshots, archived web pages, and metadata from defunct websites. The warm orange-to-pink gradient represents the browser error that now greets anyone who tries to visit these pages.

The piece includes fragments from: a LiveJournal community for amateur astronomers (deleted 2015), a Geocities fan page for a cancelled TV show (lost 2009), a Tumblr blog about urban foraging (purged 2018), and a personal homepage hosted on a university server (removed when the professor retired in 2020).

Each fragment was real. Each was made by a real person who cared enough to put it on the internet. And each is now gone — not because the content was bad, but because the platform it lived on decided to move on.

← Prev: Geocities Sunset Next: Webring (Infinite Loop) →

Platform Critique