WWW

Bio + CYO Experiment. For this first experiment, explore the three lists in the "Input" section and select any writing experiment/metagame that appeals to you. Then! Adapt it to a web platform of your choice. Take any experiment &make it speak to a platform of your choosing. When you've finished, write a bio for the psuedonymous author of your experiment so that we might get to know each other (and our avatars!) a bit better.

Bernadette Mayer, Writing Experiments (1970s)

Charles Bernstein, Writing Experiments (2006)

McKenzie Wark, Writing Metagames (2013)

The Syllabus.

Collective Selections.

Playing in Discord.

Inventing the Seminar.

Digital intimacy? What does private online community look like? How can we return our practice to older forms of a more intimate, more hand-crafted internet? This week, we'll generate a NeoCities webring for our collective use throughout the quarter. Exploring the links and resources gathered here, as well as any other site-making tools at your disposal, craft a container for your creative work in this class, featuring your first experiment from last week and any previous work you'd like to include. Consider flashing gifs, unlikely fonts, custom cursors, direct address, creative design, and other artifacts of the 90s World Wide Web in your page. Share links to the Discord server, and we'll all link to each other to complete the ring during our next session.

Aidan Strong, the interactive website designed to help you make interactive websites (2025)

Daniel Murray (Melon), Intro to the Web Revivial Part I, Part 2, Part 3; and List of Manifestoes of the Web Revival, (2022)

Paul Slocum, CATALOG OF INTERNET ARTIST CLUBS (2016)

Rhizome, Net Art Anthology (Ongoing)

Archive Team, restorativland (Ongoing)

Nathalie Lawhead, Alien Melon Portfolio (Ongoing)

Chia Amisola, Making space for a handmade web (2025)

Rosy Hearts, Neocities celebrates ‘the old internet,’ offering relief from 24/7 social feeds (2022)

Olia Lialina, FROM MY TO ME (2020) (See also: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age)

Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017)

Hito Steyerl, Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead? (2013)

Popups, slop, ads: so much of the internet experience is driven by forced interruptions, siphoning off attention to redirect toward capitalizing on the user. How might we intervene in this pervasive form? What glitches or detournements or culture jams might we introduce into these genres? What poetic practices can work within the terrain of the always-on always-advertising internet? For this experiment, we'll embed popups into our sites that direct toward creative work rather than monetized attention. Looking at the history of the Situationists, tactical media, and culture jamming, we'll hijack the form alongside popular webpages to produce a critical imaginary for living online in 2025. Concretely: find a page you'd like to intervene in, capture its code, rewrite it thoroughly, code a popup to link to the work.

Anita Solak, Cross the Border (2025)

Joannes Truyens, Matei Stanca and Younès Rabii, Neurocracy (2021)

Amaranth Borsuk, Jesper Juul and Nick Montfort, The Deletionist (2013)

Yung Jake, E.m-be.de/d (capture) (2013)

Constant Dullart, The Revolving Internet (2010)

The Yes Men, Gatt.org (1999-2002)
(See: WTO home)

Alexei Shulgin, Form Art (1997)

Ken Knabb, The Bureau of Public Secrets (Ongoing)

Alessandro Ludovico, Tactical Publishing (2023)

Nathan Allen Jones, Glitch Poetics (2022)

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020)

McKenzie Wark, "Spectacle and Détournement" (2019) (See also: The Spectacle of Disintegration, 2013)

Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink, Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (2019)

Alvaro Seiça, ARTDEL (2018-21)

Guy Debord, Methods of Détournement (1956)

Life online is a practice of generating virtual personas, usually for ourselves — written, imaged, voiced, filmed, interactive, and otherwise. With each new input the data shadows of our online selves grow that much longer. This week, we'll collaborate to create virtual personas for imagined entities in a practice of "character-building." From virtual influencers like Lil Miquela to cryptid hallucinations like LOAB to dispersed pop idols like Hatsune Miku, there are a wide array of models and practices to choose from. Is the persona a significant other, a bully, a ghost, a parole officer, a neighbor, a prophet, an alien, a mirage? Working in teams, construct a virtual persona with a creative practice of their own. See how fully-realized you can make your persona. Are they real or speculative? What are their motivations, fandoms, communities? How do they speak and whom do they speak for? Consider your own subjective coordinates and the politics of identity as you generate your collective persona. Open use of any tools or platforms is encouraged: how can a persona disperse, cohere, or cluster online? Be sure to link to and engage with your persona on your own personal sites in whatever way you choose.

Lists like: Top 50 Virtual Influencers to Follow in 2025 or reports like: State of Virtual Influencers 2025 or similar for the popular context.

Brud, Lil Miquela (Ongoing) (MANY articles GIYF)

Crypton Future Media, Hatsune Miku (Ongoing) (See also: Virtual Humans profile or any fandom entry)

LaTurbo Avedon, Portfolio (Ongoing)

Lawrence Lek, Works (Ongoing)

Joe Hunting, We Met in Virtual Reality (2022) (See also: Virtually Speaking & Club Zodiac)

Steph Maj Swanson, LOAB (2022)

Ian Cheng, BOB (Bag of Beliefs) (2018-2019)

Sondra Perry, It’s in the Game ’17 (2017)

Pierre Huyghe & Philippe Parreno, No Ghost Just a Shell (2002)

Shunji Iwai, All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)

Dakyeom Ahn et al., "I Stan Alien Idols and Also the People Behind Them: Understanding How Seams Between Virtual and Real Identities Engage VTuber Fans -- A Case Study of PLAVE" (2025)

Esperanza Miyake, Virtual Influencers: Identity and Digitality in the Age of Multiple Realities (2024)

Rossella C. Gambetti and Robert V. Kozinets, From killer bunnies to talking cupcakes: theorizing the diverse universe of virtual influencers (2024)

Rashaad Newson, Being Genesis 1.0 - 2.0 (2021)

Alison Nguyen, ANDRA8: my favorite software is being here (2020-21)

Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (2017)

Art21, Jacolby Satterwhite Dances with His Self (2013)

Perform interactions between our newly-minted virtual personas this week. Troll an avatar. Make an overture. Snark on a thread. Produce a collab. Consider how these personas might surface otherwise invisble aspects of living online. How can we play out the mechanics of persona-building? By what mechanisms can they be grasped or dispersed? Or: better, how might they depart? Where would they go? Consider working with popular forms of the apology / the unupdated / link rot / site dereliction in any creative form you want to play with (no need to attach to the persona, open for play, totally optional). Take some time to play with these new creations this week.

What is the afterlife of a zine? What are (or were) zines and why do they matter? What post-digital tools and inspirations can we use to make a zine? This week, we will create a post-digital, post-internet zine network as a class. Each person will submit their own mini zine on a topic of their choice that addresses the central theme of the class. We’ll explore the importance of paper artifacts, intertwine them with the digital, and collectively create a zine press where we can all share our work. Use the Electric Zine Maker by Nathalie Lawhead to make a zine that is one 8.5" x 11" page (which can fold to be 8 small pages). It should also have a full-page (secret!) interior. It can be about any topic you’d like, but it should either in its form or its content reflect the central thematic of the class – writing for the internet. In class we'll print, cut, fold, and distribute our zines together.

Monoskop Wiki, Zine Culture Resources (Ongoing)

Silvio Lorusso et al., Post-Digital Print Archive (Ongoing)

Internet Archive, Zine Collection (Ongoing)

Graham Cooling, Coke Oven (Ongoing)

Reddit, r/zines (Ongoing)

Annette Gilbert and Andreas Bülhoff, Library of Artistic Print on Demand (2024)

Paul Soulellis, Queer.Archive.Work (2018-)

Antoine Lefevre, ARTZINES (2016-2023)

Daniela Capistrano et al., POC Zine Project (2010-present)

QZAP, Queer Zine Archive Project (2003-present)

Allie Rigby, Inside Zine Festivals (and Why Zines Matter) (2024)

Whitney Trettien, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (2024)

Danny Snelson, Grey Libraries: Publishing as Pedagogy (2024)

Lisa Gitelman, Amateurdom and Its Discontents, Or, What Is a Zine? (2013)

Janice Radway, Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change (2011)

Liz Worth, Despite What You’ve Heard, Zines Aren’t Dead (2011)

Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (2008)

Chip Rowe, The Book of Zines (1996-2025)

V. Vale, Zines! Vol. 1 and Zines! Vol. 2 (1996-7)

This week, we'll turn our attention to new publioshing projects on the world wide web. Who publishes weird web-based writing today? What are their submission policies like? What's coming up? Where can we start to circulate the works you're making? Who are our friends, our inspirations, our peers? Where would we like to send visitors to this syllabus? For this section, we'll collectively gather links of sites we've found that aim to publish these kinds of experiments as a sort of collectively-compiled webring of interlocutors. See what you can find! We'll gather links for this section of the syllabus once the course has concluded.

crawl____space

niceinter.net/hubs

the html review

The School for Poetic Computation

Rhizome

Electronic Literature Organization

Bad Quarto (see Taper)

DIAGRAM

The New River

xxiivv webring