A Website Which Can Recall Its Past Lives

An eight-week course to explore the versatility of HTML and CSS, critically analyze the unique characteristics of the web medium, and establish yourself as a thoughtful designer who considers ethics and sustainability.

Coding Year 3, Quentin Creuzet
Graphic Design Department, KABK, The Hague
Mondays & Tuesdays, 13:30–17:30
Are.na channel with resources and references

Please arrive on time (13:30) for each course and get in touch as soon as you can to notify me of your absence or lateness.

Attendance is called during the first 15 minutes of each session. If you arrive after the call you are welcome to join, but the session is recorded as an absence, and the same applies if you leave before the end without telling me first. This course requires a minimum of 80% attendance, and after two unjustified absences I will inform the year lead and the department leads.

Course Overview

Digital media is not always there. We suffer daily frustrations with digital sources that just disappear. Digital media is degenerative, forgetful, erasable.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 1, published in 2008. Link.

The digital world has long been viewed as an everlasting solution, liberated from the ephemerality of physical objects. The risks of an Alexandria-like disaster, or worse, of a Fahrenheit 451-like intentional destruction of knowledge, would be gone for good: information would now be stored on decentralized servers and shared through a medium everyone in the world could access at any time.

The Japanese have a word for blogs that have fallen into neglect or are altogether abandoned: ishikoro, or pebbles. We live in a world of pebbles now. They litter the internet, each one a marker of writing dreams and energies that have dissipated or moved elsewhere.

Jeet Heer, “What Were Blogs?” on The New Republic, published on August 24, 2016. Link.

This initial promise revealed itself to be an illusion almost immediately. Websites decay much like the objects they were supposed to replace, and most of the time faster, a phenomenon usually referred to as ‘link rot’. For their article “URL Decay at Year 20: A Research Note”, published in 2016, Fatih Oguz and Wallace Koehler tested 360 URLs that were all accessible on the web in 1995 and found that only 2 were still responding 20 years later, in February 2015. More recently, a Pew Research Center analysis published in 2024 revealed that “a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023”.

Unlike abandoned shopping malls, which remain visible reminders of neglect in our physical landscape, the ruins of the web don’t naturally cross our path. They lurk on the periphery, only discovered through deliberate searches or chance encounters. This invisibility makes them easy to forget, and forgotten websites are only a server payment away from disappearing.

Kaloyan Kolev, “The Confiscation of Digital Memory” on Are.na Editorial, published on March 27, 2025. Link.

The reasons behind this digital rot are multiple and often mundane, from domain expiration to unpaid server costs, but they also reveal the power structures at play in a liberal economy. Millions of personal websites hosted on the popular free hosting service GeoCities disappeared when Yahoo! discontinued it in 2009, ten years after acquiring it. Similarly, Apple’s decision not to support Flash on iOS, from its very first version in 2007, condemned every website built on that technology, close to 30% of them in 2011 according to W3Techs. These sites became altogether inaccessible in December 2020, when Adobe discontinued Flash Player.

In the early years of Internet, its architecture was distributed, users published their own personal home pages and had a decentralized occupation of the space. Today, most of the activity is concentrated in the hands of a few players. These heavyweight players have dug into the Web surface, dragging activities down their slopes, activities that could have remained independent and decentralized. Instead of creating a new webpage, Internet professional and private users tend to go for a Facebook page and therefore open content hosted on the slope of a dominant curve. The question now is whether all Web activity will eventually be hosted solely on “the slopes” of a few leading players.

Louise Drulhe, The Critical Atlas of Internet, published in 2015. Link.

Furthermore, today’s web infrastructures are owned by a few tech giants whose goal is to increase the concentration of web users on their platforms and the time these users spend there. This tendency has only become more pronounced with the mainstream adoption of generative AI over the last few years, which leaves personal websites as an alternative space, one deprived of the energy and the creativity of the web communities of the 1990s and early 2000s.

With millions of websites now dead or forgotten, the history of entire alternative cultures that found on the web an emancipatory space for engagement is discarded, or remembered only for its aesthetic influence.

Websites shouldn’t have to go offline once their creators are dead, yet they mostly will unless they are hosted on a free service that will likely sustain long-term into the future. I believe websites will be future archaeological artefacts. I hope there’s a website graveyard where I can house this before I die.

Winnie Lim, “On writing to exist, and website graveyards” on winnielim.org, published on November 7, 2020, Link.

Taking the words of Kamau Brathwaite about archives, you are asked to create a website that doesn’t act as “a musty or air-conditioned room, almost inaccessible”, but rather a website that is an invitation to reflect and share. A website that would become a small-scale piece of shared memories and display an act of care for the digital object it translates.

This website should be thought of as a jungle – attempts to link to it are at your own risk. You may attempt to archive it, but should you wish to avoid sadness down the line, you should accept now in your heart that all archives will eventually succumb to the sands of time.

Wesley Aptekar-Cassels, “Stability” on wesleyac.com, published in 2022, Link.

Assignment Brief

Each of you will create a website that acts as a revival of a dead website. Your goal is not to create a mirrored version of the original website but rather to develop a contemporary reinterpretation that can serve as evidence and artefact of the original digital object. Your website should be no more than 10MB (10,000KB) in total size and should be created using only HTML and CSS. JavaScript is not allowed.

Step 1, Week 1: Choose your Website

Select a dead website from the list below. As you browse the different options, take the time to find out more about the context in which they were published, the artists or activists behind them, when they were first put online and when they were last updated. Read the website as much as you look at it. What was it for, and who was it for? What did it make possible that nothing else did at the time? Choose several websites at first, move away from the most obvious choices, and take the risk of a website whose content or form you do not immediately understand.

Step 2, Weeks 2-3: Define your Approach

Consider different methods of capturing and reinterpreting the original website, including its content and its specific digital properties and interactions. The aim is not only to transcribe the textual and iconographic content, or to simply mirror the website as it originally was. Instead, it is to provide an editorial object that is critically examined, curated, and subjectively re-read. This object then conveys the outstanding and distinctive qualities of a unique digital interface. Don’t forget that a website is, by definition, not a fixed object, and that yours probably evolved while it was still in use. Which of its states are you reviving? The first, the last, all of them at once, or the gaps between them?

Step 3, Weeks 4-5: Design without Designing

Create the visual and interactive language of your website without using graphic design software. The spirit of this assignment is amateurish in the best sense. It seeks to break free from the polished aesthetics of professional web design and social media platforms. Your design decisions should emerge from the materiality of HTML and CSS themselves, the constraints of the 10MB file size, the nature of your content, and the methods available to you without JavaScript. Consider typography as a primary design element: font choices, sizes, spacing, and line length all shape how your content is read. Think about color and contrast, layout and composition, rhythm and pacing as information unfolds across the page. How do these elements relate to the content itself?

Step 4, Weeks 6-7: Build and Refine

Develop your website using HTML and CSS. Remember that the entire website must be 10MB at most. Pay attention to clean, well-structured HTML and efficient CSS without unnecessary redundancy. Optimize file sizes for images or other assets, and test functionality across different screen sizes. Think about how visitors enter and navigate your website and how the interface guides, or doesn’t guide, reading and exploration. The relationship between interface and content matters. Consider moments of surprise, friction, or revelation. Pay close attention to microtypography and detail: line length, leading, and spacing; hierarchy and emphasis; link styling and hover states; margins, padding, and negative space. Even an amateur website is a graphic artifact, and your interface shapes how the content is read.

Step 5, Week 8: Final Presentation

Show your website to the class during a 12-minute presentation. Provide context on the website you chose to revive and explain clearly the intentions behind your own, and how it captures the uniqueness of its original counterpart. Discuss how the technical and size constraints affected your design decisions. Be prepared to discuss how your approach differs from a simple mirroring, and the gap between what you intended to create and what emerged through the process.

Websites to Revive

Choose one website from the list below. They are all part of the Cyberfeminism Index, published by American artist and researcher Mindy Seu. As these websites are not directly accessible anymore, you will need to use the emulator oldweb.today to browse an archived version of them.

Learning Goals

Build a contemporary and critical understanding of the web and technology through theories that challenge mainstream assumptions.
Deepen your technical and conceptual knowledge of web and design through a disruptive, critical, and experimental practice.
Explore web tools and their constraints, and get familiar with the structures and paradigms specific to this medium.
Overcome constraints by pushing the limits of what is possible, without fear of failure.
Work openly and generously with your fellow students, and treat design as a collaborative practice.
Propose design solutions that are inventive and grounded in ethical, social, and sustainable thinking.

Readings

You will be expected to read three texts during the block. During small group and individual talks, we will discuss and reflect on these texts in relation to your concepts, process and experiments in development.

Parimal Satyal, Rediscovering the Small Web, published in 2020, Link.
Mindy Seu, Chapter “Introduction” in Cyberfeminism Index, published by Inventory Press in 2022, Link. A recording of the book launch performance at the New Museum on November 14, 2022 is available here.
Veronica Obenauer, Data Resisting Flesh, On A Soulless Internet, published in 2024, Link.

Schedule

31.08.2026

13:30

Lecture
Introduction to the assignment

15:00

Individual talks
How do you feel about coding, particularly for the web? Are you interested in or fascinated by digital culture? Present a project from the last 12 months that best represents your practice. (all students, 5 minutes per student)

01.09.2026

13:30

Lecture
How to create a clean coding environment?

14:00

Group talks
Present the two or three dead websites you are considering and say what draws you to each of them. (groups of 5 students, 10 minutes per student)

For week 2

Write a proposal of ~200–300 words on the website you have chosen. Describe what it was and who made it, when it went online, when it stopped, and what caused it to disappear. Then say what you want to revive in it: its content, its structure, its interactions, its errors, its silences. List the archived versions you managed to find and where they are held. What can you still reach today, and what is already lost for good?

07.09.2026

13:30

Lecture
Why shouldn’t I use “position: absolute”?

14:00

Lecture
On feedback

14:30

Peer feedbacks
Present the website you chose and read your proposal to your peers. Help each other find the blind spots in the reading each of you is making.

08.09.2026

13:30

Lecture
What is image compression?

14:00

Group talks
Present your website and the angle you intend to take on it, using your proposal as a foundation. (groups of 5 students, 8 minutes per student)

For week 3

Build a raw archive of everything you can retrieve from the original website: pages, texts, images, sounds, animations, source code, broken links, error messages, screenshots of the emulator. Record where each element comes from and which archived version it belongs to. You are not designing yet, you are excavating. What does the archive hold on to, and what does it flatten or discard? What will you have to reconstruct yourself, and on what grounds?

14.09.2026

13:30

Lecture
What is the web?

14:30

Open discussion How can I organize myself to work more efficiently?

15:00

Peer feedbacks
Show your raw archive and discuss with your peers what is worth keeping, what is worth cutting, and what needs rebuilding from scratch.

15.09.2026

13:30

Lecture
TBD

14:00

Group talks
Present your archive and the first structure you imagine for your own website. (groups of 5 students, 6 minutes per student)

For week 4

Turn your raw archive into a structure. Send me a sitemap or a structural diagram of your website showing its sections, its navigation, and where each part of the material you retrieved will land. Annotate it with what you keep, what you leave out, and what you rebuild yourself. Your structure is not neutral. Where does it follow the original, and where does it break from it on purpose? What does a visitor reach first, and what do they have to dig for?

21.09.2026

13:30

Lecture
What is the “handmade web”?

14:00

Peer feedbacks
Hand your sitemap to another student and let them find their way through it without any explanation from you. Note where they get lost.

22.09.2026

13:30

Lecture
What is a “brutalist” website?

14:00

Group talks
Present your archive and your sitemap, and explain what your structure does to the original material. (groups of 5 students, 8 minutes per student)

For week 5

Prepare a 10-minute presentation on your research so far. Show the original website, your archive, and your structure, and bring any visual material or coded prototypes you have made. Say clearly what you have not solved yet and where you want feedback.