Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age

The cultural foundation for today's web was not created by Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg or Tom Anderson, but by its users, inside the tiny spaces they were assigned by Internet Giants.

The exhibition One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age showcases thousands and thousands of amateur home pages from the free web hosting service Geocities, from the second half of the 1990s. Established in 1995 and purchased by Yahoo in 1999, Geocities was suddenly shut down by Yahoo in 2009. Realising its cultural significance, the Internet Archive team managed to rescue an incomplete portion of Geocities which now lives on as a massive downloadable Torrent file.

Over the period of the show, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied will present a stream of snapshots of this lost city and its archival ruins, documenting the visual culture of the web and the creativity of its users. The project provides a glimpse into web publishing when users were in charge of design and narration in contrast to the automated templates of Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.