One Terabyte of Documentation The circulation of GeoCities : Annet Dekker and Katrina Sluis in Conversation with Olia Lialina

This chapter examines the work of artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied and their efforts to preserve, study and ultimately recirculate websites from GeoCities, an online amateur web-hosting service that emerged in 1995 before being shut down by Yahoo in 2009. The chapter offers a close analysis of their project One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, which automates the distribution of screenshots of user homepages to raise awareness and generate an appreciation of a significant but much-derided part of Internet culture. By re-animating the ‘unprofessional production’ of ordinary web users, the example seeks to critique a model of cultural value that cannot account for a web vernacular either as heritage or as a form of knowledge. Instead, by reflecting on the technical and cultural infrastructure of the project and its audiences, the case study offers insights into the cultural value of documentation by analysing how documentation as a method for conservation is about practices rather than objects.