Internet Archive

In Elbowed Antennae, Ian Aleksander Adams explored fear and fascination with social insects by finding old black and white documentaries alongside science fiction movies and home videos - all about ants. Insectoid gifs created from the Archive’s media are presented overlaid onto another animation made from archived video, that of a considering and uneasy human eye.

Each image in the full width scroll can be clicked to pop out a reblog link on tumblr which also allows the gif to be more easily viewed on its own. 

Gijsbert Wouter Wahl’s In Re Production of Tangible Things brings ephemera obsessively combed from the databases out into intertwined chapters spread across several tumblr links. 

From the description: 

“To change an archive into a possible vision, is to change a language defined by grammar and a dictionary into a medium in which you can change your mind. You must disregard how the content has originally been tagged and shelved.

Here, the archive has been pictured as a language that is not defined but spoken. Speaking without any idea of definition, is like speaking in tongues. The bonds between the images here are not meaning, they are like meaning. Out of their original positions in files and books, they can now become part of a new territory from which we can drill back into sources that may otherwise have remained invisible.”

Building on a theme made available by Ok Focus, Gijsbert creates layers of meaning with literally layered transparent images. 

Theodore Fox’s project Text Lit converts the tumblr page into a site that looks just like a txt file. Theodore curates from the wayback machine web archive, bringing out “text scene” highlights from the monospace writing culture.

From his introduction: 

“The text scene which emerged in the mid to late nineties and carried through to about 2005 was an odd product of nostalgia for the writings hosted on BBSs held by people just old enough to have read them before the internet took over. As a result, they took a lot of style and tone from a previous generation of hackers and trouble-makers, but turned the medium into a literary one. Most of these writers were teenagers and filled hundreds of kilobytes worth of text files (tfiles for short) with short fiction, essays, poetry, and diaries to the world.”

Lemon’s blog spotlight, The Happiness Show, brings us media from the public access show of the same name (currently all archived!)

He’s recreated the Happiness Show website as a tumblr theme and repopulated it with gifs, video clips, and sound bites pulled from the collection.

Isaac Parker’s One Single Catastrophe is a visual poem and moving collage built from Archive resources.

The individual pieces can be clicked to view animated gifs separately from the background collage. 

Dylan Meade’s project Notions of Limburger, is an investigation of culture, identity, and the feeling of being out of your depth. 

The content is centered around intertwined keywords such as Health, Responsibility, Scandal, Context, Excess, Advertising, Censorship, Derangement, Work, Worship, Bombardment, and Morality.

In Dylan’s words, “I thought it was important to try and illuminate two sides of a one sided argument. It’s a selfish androcentric world. But thank God for changing ideas and collectors.”

For Channel Spelunking, Kat searched the Archive’s TV News collection (available at http://tv.archive.org/) for interesting clips and created gif sets shown on the tumblr. 

Jackson’s project, the Found Footage Music Video Anthology, is a curated selection of music videos that had been created using the film footage from the archive.

He notes, “artifacts of the past have been re-contextualized within the music culture of the internet." 

Heidi and Adam’s project Every Server at the Internet Archive is an impressive scroll through the server stacks that hold archive.org’s collections. 

From their statement: “To most of us, the whole structure is secretive and opaque, assuming we think about it at all.

For us, it wasn’t until we were crawling on hands and knees down a narrow hallway lined with server racks—humming, seemingly-alive towers of plastic and metal, flashing and animating unpredictably, hot recycled air breathing down on us—that we began to appreciate the enormity of the invisible scaffolding of the Information Age.”

In Disc Image, Matthew brings us a curated collection of software CDs picked out from The Shareware CD Archive.

His 3D rendered spinning CDs can be hovered over for a preview of the contents and then clicked to head through to the page where you can download and mount the CDs for yourself.

In Tile Archive, Collecting background images and logos from the Archive’s Wayback Machine, Ben presents you with a fullscreen wash from 1996-2003. 

Click through the links under each tiling to see the images in the original context.

Dianna created collages and curated videos from the various Archive collections for his multimedia project Classical Deconstruction.

David Schulman’s project The Year Was 1985 is “reflecting on the past, the year that brought us the future." 

In 1985, Steve Jobs resigned, Super Mario Bros. was released, Calvin and Hobbes had its debut, the Unabomber injured his first victim, and the Free Software Foundation was founded. Learn about these events and more at David’s project.

Ben Valentine’s A Fragile Archive is a multimedia essay on information politics, digital privacy and data accessibility.

Juan Manuel Morales’ Mexico.zip is a portrait of Mexico through it’s early web presence, geography and sociocultural tensions.