The Internet Archive Tumblr Residencies

Starting in 2013, many applicants (from librarians, curators and gallery artists to programmers, poets, writers and self proclaimed ‘internet weirdos’) applied to an experimental program where they’d be encouraged to sequence, combine, and remix content from the vast depths of http://archive.org.

These people joined us in a digital ‘residency’ called the Internet Archive Tumblr Residency. The applicants were all over the world and worked for a long time with our Archive staff over dispersed media like skype and google docs to create their projects. Their support came in the form of coding help and project management from volunteer community architect Ian Aleksander Adams, who ideated and oversaw the program.

Each project took the shape of a tumblr site with the resident’s content built in as posts, but their vision wasn’t limited to the posts themselves - they each created a unique experience with a tumblr theme coded to coincide with the resident’s ideas and goals for the project.

When the ‘residency’ time was ready (throughout 2014) each person’s project was posted at the http://internetarchive.tumblr.com URL and unveiled for the world to see - for that week they had our tumblr and it became theirs, theme and all. After that week each project remained public and archived at is own URL. They can be viewed below through this tag. 

The projects that went up - by Jeff Thompson, Steven Ovadia, Adam Ferriss, Matthew Mariner, Angela Smith, Caden Lovelance, Manett, Chris Markman, Kelly Kietur, Mary Bond, Christine Lusey, Ben Baker-Smith, Louise Barry, Zak Loyd, Ian Aleksander Adams, Gijsbert Wouter Wahl, Theodore Fox, Lemon Innes, Isaac Parker, Dylan Meade, Kat Hache, Jackson Neil Eudy, Heidi and Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Matthew Williamson, Benjamin Loeffler, Dianna Dragonetti, David Schulman, Ben Valentine, Manuel Morales, Huseyin Kishi, Meghan Ferriter, Jamie Allen, and Maria Lin - brought our new tumblr web presence from 10 followers to around 9000 and created many beautiful new experiences out of ‘old’ content.

They demonstrated that the Internet Archive isn’t just a place you can go to find almost anything - it’s a place that can be used to build and educate. We hope the spirit of the project’s remixing and evolving of Archive content continues and these participants can show everyone some of the possibilities. Enjoy!

Most Frequent Word Search by Jeff Thompson

Jeff Thompson's Most Frequent Word Search is an algorithmic-curatorial project. It uses the 250 most-frequent unique words in the oldest text with a date listed in Project Gutenberg - "Old Mortality, Volume 2" by Sir Walter Scott. Each word is used as a seed for a new search into the Archive. The most common word in the resulting text is used as a new search term. The process is repeated until the search returns no results. The project features a unique original theme with click and drag functionality, allowing users to aesthetically arrange the computationally generated and randomly displayed results, if they wish to attempt to seek their own patterns.

A History of Linux Websites by Steven Ovadia

Steven Ovadia's History of Linux Websites traces the history of Linux through the screenshots of the web sites of Linux distributions and projects.

Looking at the screenshots gives viewers insights not just into the various histories of the various distributions, but also provides insight into the web design aesthetics that guide these distributions. In many cases, the design aesthetic of the web site does not match up against the philosophy of the distribution, making for an interesting tension.

Record Ruins by Adam Ferriss

Adam Feriss' Record Ruins is alternate slice of archive.org where one file begets another. Culled from screenshots, old graphics recordings, and computer schematics, the documents are spun through an array of custom algorithms to re-sort and degrade the source material into pixelated specters of their former lives. The final project is a set of interactive environments, gifs, and videos resembling a segment of corrupted archive. Each document’s source files have been uploaded to the archive for posterity and future reworkings.

The Net Cafe Effect by Matthew Mariner

In Matthew Mariner's Net Cafe Effect, he's put together a project introducing episodes from the 1996-2002 show Net Cafe culled from the Archive.  His project is presented (with a wink) inside website design that should feel familiar to any traveler of the early internet. Matt adds his thoughts to that of the show hosts in order to bring some of today's perspective to the topics the episodes explore.  His conversational commentary rounds out this personal ode to fanpages on the web and a very interesting show with, as he says, relatable guests, "not-so-relatable" hosts and lots of nostalgia.

Entropic Me by Angela Smith

In Angela Smith's Entropic Me, she searched the Archive for images using the tags “selfie”, “self-portrait”, “self”, and “self photography” and then created a new archive with these pieces glitched alongside her own modified self portrait images. It explores identities lost through the bending of data indicating that a self portrait has occurred.

Images can be clicked through to a larger view and then the source, where the viewer unexpectedly ends up discovering a new point in time and a new identifying selfie.  Engrossed in exploring the internet’s virtual tome of selfie culture, Entropic Me bends our notion of self and allows us to get lost and end up in unexpected places.

Softwet by Caden Lovelace

Caden Lovelace's Softwet is a set of seven old programs and young reminiscings. It's about software and humans.

You will learn how to best catch bass, what life might be like if things had been different, and also your future and how to explode a bomb. All of these things are in Softwet and all you need to do is click over to the project URL to run the programs in your browser.

Message In A Bottle by Manett

Manett's Message In A Bottle asks if you could write a message in a bottle, what would it say? Manett grew up on a tiny island in Micronesia; its history will wash away with the tide.  For her tumblr project, she collected signs of life in the vast and mysterious Pacific ocean. She placed these within bobbing bottles that you can hover over to explore.

Deadbased by Chris Markman

Chris Markman's Deadbased tracks Grateful Dead tours in the 60s.

Markman created interactive timelines and maps linked from each tumblr post and curated a selection of images from each tour. Rounding out each post are links to recordings of the actual performances from the live music archive!

8-bit Riot by Kelly Kietur

Kelly Kietur's 8-bit Riot is "focused around the Historical Software collection because of aesthetic as well as my nostalgia. Some of the software I remember from childhood, while others were completely new to me.

The fact that the Internet Archive is making these available to use in-browser without having to download an emulator is so amazing and important."

Girl 512kb by Mary Bond

Mary Bond's Girl 512kb is an exploration of what it means to be a girl in an age where an infinite number of narratives are displayed to girls and expected to be followed. These videos were all discovered by searching Internet Archive collections for the word “girl.” By collecting them all into one place and juxtaposing them against a singular archetypal animation found in the archive, Mary intends to reveal cognitive dissonance that is inherent in the act of being a girl.

The Year 1968 by Christine Lusey

Christine Lusey's project The Year 1968 tells the story of America during an iconic period. 

As Christine says: "I wanted to see how much of the story of 1968 in America – what people might have seen, heard and experienced – I could tell using just content found in the Internet Archive. There are a handful of posts where I give a bit of back story, but for the most part, I wanted to present it as-is, kind of like a 1968 digital scrapbook."  "The yearbooks I felt were especially helpful in giving at least a glimpse of what life was like then for young people. 1968 was such a tumultuous and tragic year, but there was inspiration, creativity, fun and hope for the future at the same time."

Isolated Elements by Ben Baker-Smith and Evan Kühl

Isolated Elements is a collection of videos created by Ben Baker-Smith, in collaboration with sound artist Evan Kühl. Each video is constructed from materials hosted by Internet Archive and selected for their relation to five of the classical elements: space, water, fire, wind, and earth. The classical elements represent a perspective which defines matter in terms of its function; what it does, not what it is.  The raw materials for Isolated Elements are treated in a similarly naïve yet pragmatic way, emphasizing the unique aesthetic qualities of digital video over the accurate reproduction of real world imagery.

Adventures Close To Home by Louise Barry

Louise Barry's Adventures Close to Home is a selection of videos from the collection of the Internet Archive, spanning 80 years and including educational productions, ephemeral films, advertisements, experimental films, cartoons, home movies, and vlogs.  This project looks at the American iconography of travel: road trips, wanderers, vacations, car culture, and the relationship of this imagery to persistent myths of an expansive landscape ready for exploration.  It examines the formation of a cultural identity based on ideals of discovery, exploration, and individualism, and the way that identity is expressed through media produced by NASA, the military and counter-cultural figures like Timothy Leary, as well as complicated through the stories of an undocumented Mexican immigrant or a San Francisco transit worker. In it, Barry also considers ways in which these powerful spatial metaphors follow us beyond physical space—influencing our understanding of dreams, virtual environments, and online navigation. 

DitherDrive by Zak Loyd

In DitherDrive, Zak Loyd uses Archive resources to create colorful mashups that explore coming of age while the internet came of age. His tumblr site showcases 9 posts that track, in his words, "the arc of puberty following the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the ecstatic panic of navigating directory structures for cached NSFW content on your parents' desktop, and dithered manifestations of pansexual, non-binary identities forged by pre-social media, digital flux personas."

Elbowed Antennae by Ian Aleksander Adams

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. 

In Re Production of Tangible Things by Gijsbert Wouter Wahl

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. 

TextLit by Theodore Fox

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."

The Happiness Show by Lemon Innes

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.

One Single Catastrophe by Isaac Parker

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.