016: more than a site
What can appear once we start treating websites as empty canvases, as spaces of possibilities, small and big? I'll be taking a break from weekly essays, and share a tiny website every week. A website can just be a solid color and nothing else, and I would argue that is more meaningful than the majority of websites out there. Definitely more meaningful than the soulless template site selling another SaSS product.
Below I talk a bit more about these tiny sites as well as share the first one!
Every web page has the potential to be anything.
It feels absurd that we are so globally connected via the internet, that resources such as Wikipedia point towards what is possible in terms of knowledge-sharing and collaborating, that so many people around the world can access these pages, via their phones, and yet our main relationship and interaction with the web is through a handful of websites and applications. The internet has been molded into something where we visit 3-4 sites a day, Instagram, Facebook, GMail, etc.
The website is an empty canvas, and it's been framed to have limited uses and potential. The limitless design possibilities are funneled into templates and grids that make the majority of the web look and feel the same, in service of making it easier to generate websites quicker and have it adapt to more devices and more scenarios without additional hand-crafted thought or consideration.
What does it mean to log on and be a computer user? Why are we users? Why are we not creators, operators, citizens, co-collaborators in this virtual network and world? Especially when we look at the internet as this constructed space, the notion of the user is not a law of nature, it's an intentional imposed relationship, encouraging people that come onto the web to be consumers, to be passive participants. Instead of people coming on to learn how to build a website, or to have a local community manage a server, everything is maintained by conglomerates and obfuscated to the degree where it is now too difficult for people interested to learn how to build in today's web.
We can create a series of tiny sites that demonstrate different possibilities for how a web page functions and how it displays. Building upon zine culture, which explored the possibilities with writing and publishing beyond the bounds dictated by the industry and capital, tiny.sites will feature many tiny sites that explore how much and how little can be created within the HTML walls.
The thing about a web page is that it rarely understands its existence outside of its window. Sure, there are a myriad of links that go from here to there, and you can always go back and forward. But what lies outside the browser window? Here we have an image and sentence, a website that can only be complete by opening up another website. An art object in two pages, a spread divided.
Click "THIS SIDE LEFT" to reveal the second half of the website. Then make sure it's in a separate browser window from the first page, and then line them up.