my first encounters with the world wide web
I was familiar with computers since I was small, and I had seen the internet on TV… but it’s harder to show a website on TV than to show TV on a website. My first real internet experience was at the library, I was 16 years old. I surfed a bit, mostly looking for interviews with bands. It was terribly slow, but I enjoyed it already. A few months later our home computer got a dial-up connection and I got more into it. I would write down my favorite websites on a piece of paper, I did not know about browser bookmarks…
Dutch progressive broadcasting station VPRO used to have a website with “Lifesavers”. Lifesavers were something that “does not happen in a book, does not happen on TV, an experience specific to the internet.”
It was a series of experimental websites by artists such as Peter Luining and Han Hoogerbrugge, exploring what a website could be, and playing with the slow connections of the internet, turning it into a strength.
I still love small files.
(this is part of a forthcoming interview by Johanna Bergmark)
