Management consultant turned digital archaeologist Jim Boulton had a revelation while at the Barbican's 2002 Game On exhibition. "It struck me that here I was looking at 30 years worth of video games," he tells WIRED.co.uk. "I thought that someone should curate and exhibit <a style="background-color: transparent;" href="/websites">websites</a>. Given we were losing them at such a rapid pace."
The idea stayed lodged in Boulton's mind for eight years, but when he heard that an acquaintance was bringing New York's Internet Week festival to London in 2010, he decided it was time to take part. He bought a few vintage computers off eBay, pulled some old code off his network and set up Digital Archaeology -- an exhibition that charted the "disruptive moments of web design," and the characters who shaped its evolution. The show was a success, piquing the interest of people from all walks of life, and garnering Google's sponsorship for an even bigger event in New York for the following year. "People were interested as they'd witnessed this evolution of websites over a short period of time," says Boulton, who contextualised his exhibit by juxtaposing an old website with a digital camera, magazine and CD from the same time frame. Boulton asserts that both the collection and curation of old websites "plugs gaps in the historical record". "One of my frustrations was that everyone knows about
Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the people who built the web, as well as the business people who made money. But they don't know about the artists, designers and the volunteers who have creatively shaped the web," says Boulton. "I'm trying to communicate the untold story of those [other] people who shaped the web." Among these notables, Boulton referred to online magazine Word's editor-in-chief Marissa Bowe and Brian Behlendorf, who created the world's most popular and free web server, Apache. "What became apparent is that history is quite arbitrary -- whoever has the loudest voice, has their version of history recorded. Archaeology is more evidence-based, it just makes the historical record more accurate," says Boulton, who applied this thinking to the digital sphere.
As to how he got dubbed a "digital archaeologist,"
Boulton recalls a conversation with lead singer of punk band Gang of Four, Jon King. "He said this was archaeology: 'You're digging up websites and restoring them to their former glory. You're recontextualising them and they're telling us about dotcom culture.'"
The founding of non-profit organisation the Internet Archive in 1996 established online access to historical collections in digital form for researchers, historians, scholars and the general public. The archive houses everything from texts, audio, images, software and web pages. What the Archive has yet to do, however, is exhibit the collected web pages in physical form.
"What I'm trying to do," explains Boulton, "is bring back the website together with the technology that it was built in and for. It's not just about the website itself, but about the hardware, the operating system, the plugin and the browser.
It's about showing them in one environment together so that people can really appreciate the websites and the environments that they were optimised for."
A great example of the inspiration behind Boulton's work is the first ever web page, published by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. It marked an epic moment in the history of technology. Yet astonishingly, despite a CERN project restoring the 1992 version of the page back in 2013, there is no copy of the first web page ever created. "Berners-Lee kept writing and saving over it," says Boulton, who notes that Berners-Lee saved the first web page six months after he first published it. "There aren't even any screenshots," he laments. "That code and that monumental point in history has been lost forever."
While Boulton remarks that 48 copies of the first Gutenberg Bible exist, he attributes the absence of humanity's first page of HTML to our perceptions of the digital. "We see digital as disposable, a lot of websites from the 90s have been lost, or stored on obsolete media such as floppy disks."
Intent on celebrating the "Golden Age" of the internet when the web was more open, built on experimentation and without financial incentive, Boulton says he wants to "restore websites to their former glory," but that part of the problem is motivating people. "If the people who had created those websites were invited to be part of an exhibition, they'd need to grab that code, then I could save it."
Next up, Boulton is determined to find sponsors to support a touring exhibition so that he can pool old code from people all over the world and exhibit globally. In the meantime, he is working on the next phase of artistic project /Root in collaboration with The Space. Boulton explains that this is a software programme that aims to fill the gaps in digital history by tagging all the people, organisations, and technologies that took part in shaping the web. "The plan is for the computer to tell its own history free from bias."
*Jim Boulton is the author of 100 Ideas That Changed The Web.
You can see more of his work here.*
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
