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Dobody's capsule
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There are millions of webpages on the internet, specifically on the wbe, which are dead-end. I find this quite poetic that among a sea of hypertextual movement those pages stand still, with little to no links towards them, and no links at all from them to the outside. They are dead ends that beg you to check them out, ones that have nothing to offer but themselves. Hermit pages. There is poetry in this. Sometimes, they are pages which exist, but whose domain doesn't exist by itself, with no way of tracing them back to a bigger context or circumstances, other than what their contents say about them.
So I created my own, as an art installation, to pay homage to those pages. I created a php file with a JS script to disable the back button on the browser. Once the page is loaded, the PHP changes the name of the file to a random unique ID. This means the URL you'll see on the bar does not exist anymore. All that remains is a spectre, the image of its contents, which will die as soon as you leave or reload the page to find yourself facing a 404. But before you do that, the script prints out the new address, that can once again only be visited once. The only way to keep the page alive is to give the link to someone you trust will save the new generated link. The internet, as in Hito Steyerl's 'Too Much World: Is The Internet Dead?' has expanded outside the servers, outside of the endless web of linking, into intimate relations with people. And this page's only means of survival is being shared to pne person at a time. Only I have access to its ID and only through FTP.
Inside, you can find this plain text ode:
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This page is an ode to itself and all other dead ends of the internet, nodes that aren't, extremities that aren't attached. The odd, ugly, demoded, and unsurfable pages that lie in a studied serenity, where the H in HTML stands for Hermit. The pages that are never connected but exist out there, referenced much more by their URL in printed, unclickable matter, laborious copying of dots, slashes and hyphens.
The silent guards of the city, the standing outposts forever banished to protect the connectedness and networking they will never be able to partake in.
Woe to the unsung heroes of the web, their existence hardly to be ever seen again,
this generation of pages on domains that lost their use,
Where subsubdomain.subdomain.domain.extension/directory/subdirectory/hash/hash.htm sings the song of a fate that befell thousands,
But that now none know.
In a sea of pacing waves, clashing currents and foamy explosions,
The dead end pages write their ghostly calm.
They are the real static, they are the groundbreakers,
In as much as they destroy the ground the website-surfer marches, valliantly and with surefootedness on.
They are traps for the viewport, from which no action can be taken. Their only coordinates and points of reference are their existence and themselves.
They exist to exist, a true will to live, reduced the will to power to ashes.
Woe to the unsung heroes of the web, the dead end pages, standing alone, yet in millions.
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The webpage is somewhere in delyo.be/1234578/, but the index file of that directory will not help you. Try it.
Kudos if you manage to find the randomly generated file, because the probabilities are it no longer exists.
- Dobody
If you wrote a reply to this article or on the same subject, please email me at sayhi[at]delyo[dot]be to notify me. I'd love to hear your feedback and link it here.
An ode to dead end webpages was published on 2024-01-02