RETRO_WEB (2025)

Eleven self-contained HTML documents, each a personal homepage in the style of the 1998–99 web, generated in December 2025 with Claude Opus 4.5 and framed by a short written statement. The personas include a goth teenage poet, a self-styled hacker, a Y2K survivalist, an anime fan, an amateur photographer, a professor, a New Age contactee, a nu-metal band’s singer, a fictional federal bureau, a new religious movement, and a net.art practitioner.

The construction is period-accurate in markup and static in behavior. Pages use nested table layouts, font tags, marquees, inline hex colors, and a CSS keyframe animation standing in for the blink tag, which no longer renders. The collection ships markup only: image tags point at files that were never made, and several pages render their animated-GIF slots as bracketed text descriptions instead. There is no JavaScript anywhere except one snippet on the photographer’s page that disables right-click with a copyright alert — itself a period-authentic gesture rather than working protection.

The era’s social machinery is present as surface only. Three pages carry guestbook forms; one posts to a mailto: address, one has no action attribute, one submits to #. Every visitor counter is a hardcoded number in the markup. The net.art page goes furthest into fiction, describing in prose several conceptual works the persona supposedly made — a domain serving procedurally generated 404 poems, a piece rendering the cursor traces of previous visitors — none of which exist; the page is static text describing them.

The statement argues that a personal homepage of that period was an act of self-construction addressed to an unknown reader, and that guestbooks, counters, and webrings all functioned as proof that someone had arrived. It holds that these particular personas are fabrications rather than reconstructions of real people, and asks what separates a fabricated persona from a real person performing a version of themselves for an audience — a question it declines to resolve. It extends the parallel to the model that generated the pages, and closes on the observation that the pages, the guestbook culture, and the act of generating the collection are versions of the same gesture: leaving evidence of presence for whoever finds it later.