The Offline Website Project
The Offline Website Project (TOWP) is a domestic disruption of the distributed logic of the world wide web. Meant to run locally only on the computer where these sites are created and hosted, TOWP users need to physically travel to the home of the artist and participate in a site-specific experiencing of these digital works. TOWP sites are thus unique material objects: non-replicable, non-sharable, non-transferrable; they are ingrained in a place and a concrete home computer. Yet their existence is virtual and layered like the digital machine.
Domestic constrains imply that TOWP sites will rarely be experienced in their true interactive form and, like with any other performative discipline, access to them is limited to video documentation.
With The Offline Website Project webness is stripped from the global network to be rooted, deeply, at home.
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“beauty routine” (below), TOWP’s first site, is a poetic commentary on the possibility of thinking beauty only in local terms, seeing beauty as always pertaining to a physical body. As most of my work, this involves thinking about my own displacement and beauty (as a foreign female body in the USA) and how this relates to the larger spaces I occupy and the environmental impact of my occupation. “beauty routine” is currently on display at Hyperobjects at the Worth Ryder Gallery at Berkeley (Oct 16-Nov 7, 2019). I also read it at Escape Keys at UC Santa Barbara (Oct 17, 2019). It was featured in Broken English‘s pavilion at the Wrong Biennale (Nov 1, 2019-Feb 29, 2020) and also featured at the (un)continuity virtual exhibition (Jul 13-20, 2020) planned as two separate installations for the UCF Art Gallery and Orlando CityArts but moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Room #3” (below) is a crossover poem between TWOP and corporate poetry. It is an offline website created during the global pandemic of 2020 so, obviously, it will never leave my house. And, also obviously, it’s a Zoom room.
“Room #3” was included in the online exhibition “Texts of Discomfort” (ICIDS, November 2020) and the online exhibit “COVID/ E-Lit” part of the Electronic Literature Organization Media Arts Festival 2021. It was also on display at was on display at Caracteres, an exhibition at the Instituto Cervantes, New York City (April-May 2023). It was also featured in the documentary “COVID E-Lit: Digital Art during the Pandemic“ (2022), co-produced by Anna Nacher, Søren Pold, Scott Rettberg and Ashleigh Steele.
The Offline Website Project is also anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol.4 (yay!)
Stay tuned for more, or come visit and check out the real thing.
(oh yeah, that’s right, it’s 2020. you can’t visit. oh well)
AlexXO