The works in this program call on my inner internet child, left behind on early-2000s platforms like MySpace. Here, the digital plane becomes haunted by a familiar past. Ancient avatars, unruly subjects, and gaudy profile layouts, shaped by the internet’s early mess and excess, resist contemporary pursuits of mastery and efficiency, surfacing early selves left behind for their failure to be productive. These works subvert the language of mastery by using pixelated .gifs, 3D-modelled landscapes, and found footage to raise questions about the origins of our early selves and what remains of them in the hyper-optimized present. This self has been shaped by broken HTML code and self-built worlds that extractive data practices have since paved over. Still, the traces of our early internet selves persist.
Across the program, these unfinished selves share a refusal of optimization. Through perseverance, they have survived decades of software updates, compression, and neglect, forming a swirling archive of early online exchange, chaotic and ungoverned by efficiency. What happened to our unusable contributions to the internet? Have they been drifting around as fragmented pixels, waiting to be regurgitated by future users?
These digital leftovers linger as material that dominant systems cannot absorb or render profitable. Instead, they spill into myths, trends, and ghosts within the algorithms of the next generation. Given a second life through contemporary appropriations of early Y2K aesthetics, fragments of our past selves, first born online in the early 2000s, are returned to us, altered in the process. The next generation reworks and returns parts of ourselves that could liberate, while exorcising the outdated toxins that shaped their origins. Moving through popular culture and online subcultures, this program proposes an alternative lineage of the internet, one that can nurture and heal our inner internet child by reclaiming the mess and excess of our past and refusing the optimization of future.