What I'm listening to this week
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age — Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied's Tumblr of rescued GeoCities pages. Not exactly music. More like scrolling through a graveyard of someone's 1998 enthusiasm. The animated gifs, the midi files, the "Under Construction" signs — someone loved this enough to make it, and then the platform died and took everything down. Put it on. Sit with what it means.
I mean—look at us, from the past! The rosy cheeks from the 90's (although I had my first used computer in 2003 because — Poland and poor : ) , the double chins we didn't care about, and nobody twerked. If you remember those times, you must remember when the sun was still yellow and not, like now, aluminium white. When She, the Sun, was properly hot, the birds didn't randomly fall sick around some towers or data centers, when we went to libraries every Wednesday and ate uninjected chicken.
How good we had.
I lost a painting once. Not physically; the physical painting exists. I lost the process: the photograph I took at the third wash, when the color was exactly right before I pushed too far. I lost the version that was better than the finished thing.
I didn't have a backup system then. I had a folder on my desktop called "Art" with no hierarchy and no dates. I had the smug assumption that my hard drive was a permanent object.
Digital work is not a painting. A painting survives fire, flood, neglect. A hard drive fails silently, on a Tuesday, for no reason. And then it's gone — not just the file, but the record of the making. The time-lapse of a Bloomlands piece in progress. The licensing folder with five years of contracts. The course module you spent forty hours building.
This is not a dramatic thing to lose. Until it happens.
Since then, I run two systems, one for backup, one for access. They are not glamorous. Nobody makes content about them. But they are why I sleep. I point you to them below.
What I read this week
Olia Lialina's essay A Vernacular Web — the one about the early internet's graphic language before everything became minimal and correct. She writes about the beauty of the under-construction GIF, the animated starfield, the midi file that started playing when you landed on someone's page. What she's really writing about is what it means to make something on a platform you don't own, and what it means to lose it when that platform disappears. GeoCities died in 2009. She started archiving it in 2010.
Twelve seconds too late and a decade of human earnestness would have been gone completely.
She is the reason it wasn't. She says:
So what was this culture? What do we mean by the web of the mid 90's and when did it end?
To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction.
Slow and Under Construction is what authenticity was. Back then.
What I love this week — two things, because I cannot help myself
Backblaze — Unlimited Cloud Backup. A proper love mention, as I have been using them since 2010.
$99/year. Continuous backup of everything on your computer, unlimited storage, running silently in the background while you paint. I do not think about it. That is the entire point. It backs up raw files, PSDs, video exports, the vault — all of it, automatically, to a server that is not in my house. If my MacBook died tonight, I would restore from Backblaze tomorrow. They send you a hard drive. The interface is clean, the speeds are fast, and the price is so reasonable it's almost suspicious. This is not optional. This is the cost of taking your digital work seriously. Get yours.
Different function entirely: Dropbox is for access, not backup. I use it to share high-res files with licensing clients instantly, to find images on my phone when I'm out of the studio, to hand off files to agents. The sync is fast and reliable. The folder sharing is clean — I can give a client one folder with their licensed images, and they never need to email me. Backblaze is the archive. Dropbox is the nervous system. You probably need both.
Other Internet Love plucked from the Garden of e-Delights:
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Olia Lialina on the vernacular web — about what gets lost when platforms die. Not just data. The human impulse that made the thing.
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Design Observer ‘The museum-going cannibal:’ On Francis Bacon
— On the heels of this month’s Louvre heist, a poet reflects on his own hellish — and oddly heartening — encounter at a famed museum.
What I'm working on, studio bits.
Running a full audit of my file structure this week; something I do once a year and resist every time. The licensing folder alone has grown to a size that requires an actual system. I'm moving toward organizing by series rather than by year, which is how I think about the work anyway. Bloomlands gets its own world. Wetlands get their own. The folder structure should reflect the cosmology of the paintings.
"The opposite of the internet is forgetting." — Olia Lialina
