//subdivision

I was digging around on the Wayback Machine today, and got all nostalgic looking at old versions of Subdivision, from back when I was a student from 1999-2001, producing similar feelings to poking around in those old boxes of photos under the stairs

2/2/2001: "sub^division was officially launched today, much to the rapture of... well, just me, really."

It struck me how differently websites are set up today, compared to eight years back, in terms of publicity. That original site struggled to reach 100 hits, yet today, services like wordpress, and advanced SEO practices, mean that google will direct substantially more traffic in a short amount of time. With a small personal site, a hit would invariably be a real-life friend or acquaintance visiting the site because you told them the URL. These days it's quite rare for a personal / blog site to be reached in this way. And back then, everyone had a splash page. I wonder, do young internet users even know what a splash page is..?

The 'blog' hadn't been conceived, so people kept a journal and separate guestbook.

3/3/2001: "me mussis' birthday (andre)- I sneak her off to sunny brighton for the weekend. twas f'kin windy, but great to get out of the sticky pores of london."

15/04/2001: "the day i've been dreading for ages - andre left today, to go home to brisbane. time to find out if internet relationships really work :0("

By the way, apparently that internet relationship didn't work terribly well in the end..

It was so nice to see the date that I got my skates in London; I don't have that pair anymore, some Hypno removable frame skates. I put them in a charity clothing box, I wonder sometimes if that's one of the weirdest pieces of 'clothing' they have had donated

24/04/2001: I re-ignite an old love today, in an assault on london's civilians with a pair o' in-line skates.

I also had a dig through some of the media on one of my favourite sites fom back then, http://www.praystation.com, set up by Joshua Davis. He was the Flash experimentalist of the day, with a massive following as a New Media artist, central to the massive creative movement surrounding Macromedia Flash 4 in the boom of the Web. As a student, I would avidly log on to his site to watch as the countless iterations of Flash experiments grew, eager to see what this new medium was capable of in the hands of an obsessive.

Flash 4 was limiting enough to inspire people to want to push the boundaries of it's capabilities, yet the code structure allowed for almost limitless creativity, unlike today's Flash, which takes much longer to truly master. For many, Flash 4 would be an accessible, and most importantly, visual way, to understand programming, and even to revisit the mathematics and physics techniques which they were not inspired to learn at high school. Equivalents do exist today, but in different realms of the computing world, in platforms such as Processing and Quartz Composer

I bought his Praystation Harddrive back in 2002 and found a couple of original photos on Wayback This was an incredible archive of all his creative work (basically, as the name suggests, his harddrive..), in a box the shape of the newly released PS2. Sadly, one of my 'friends' never gave back the CD, but I do still have the box :/

It was sad to see however, that Davis' site was largely unarchived due to it being Flash-based. Wayback does seem to keep some objects in multimedia formats; I was able to find my own Director experiments, but this reminded me of how Flash was regarded when it first came in to popular use on the Web with Flash 4 in the early noughties. We knew Flash was 'bad'... But who could predict that thousands of sites would be lost in internet history forever.

Tagged as flash, internet, joshua davis, nostalgia, praystation, web + Categorized as Blog