<nettime> False Memories

[olia lialina <olia@profolia.org>]

Dear nettimers,

allow me please to share some false memories with you

online for some weeks only (not for the sake of scarcity, but due to 
high costs of running publicly accessed virtual machines)

http://art.teleportacia.org/tmp/

False Memories, Olia lialina, 2020

For Internet Explorer 6, Windows 2000, and virtual machine


My professional life happens in two dimensions. In IRL one it’s the end 
of Summer 2020, where Microsoft just announced that Internet Explorer – 
the notorious web browser that for many was the only window into the WWW 
for quarter of century – has been discontinued. It’s the end of the era.

In my Geocities Timeline, 2004 has just started. I’m surrounded by 
bright and loud web pages made for Internet Explorer 6 which, still a 
monopolist at that time, offered a lot of awesome features for web 
designers. One of them was changing the colors of scrollbars. Web makers 
of 15 years ago valued it a lot , incorporating the browser’s interface 
into their own interfaces, merging aesthetics of the page with the 
aesthetic of the window containing it, feeling in control. I have an 
impressive collection of web pages where the scrollbar is visually 
merged with the background of the web page, creates a contrast to it, 
rhymes with the title picture, or changes it’s color when moved. Rich 
User Experience at it’s best!

2004 was the last year of Internet Explorer’s dominance. In November 
that year, Mozilla released Firefox, with the aim to end Microsoft’s 
monopoly once and forever.

False Memory is a tribute to both, IE users and developers.

But also my remark on exponentially growing nostalgia about the web’s 
past. False Memory offers to immerse in netstalgia gilty pleasures: to 
idealize past, to homogenize past; to rewrite it; to remember things 
that never happened to you or at all…but you so much want to believe the 
opposite.

False Memories wouldn’t be possible without Dragan Espenschied’s 
recollections and scripts.

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