low fidelity #2 dirtstyle, sitting in stairwells, dreams of getting even, and web aesthetics
the green was so green
In this series I talk about music/making and give extended commentary around my pursuit of a low fidelity life (it’s not what you think it is)
This month in the lo-fi
Making like dirt and the metaphor towards analogue living it affords. i.e. digging for records, on soundcloud, in a bookstore, composting (not to be confused with rotting) in bed, and hyperbolically exclaiming: not until I’m six feet under! at the slightest request. In fact, my dedication to the dirt lifestyle led me so far as to purchase 1.6 tonnes of dirt for this exhibition
Using as many social medias as possible. I recently downloaded letterboxd. Now with substack, instagram, facebook, and tiktok, I never have to listen my own thoughts again
Fantasising about whatever the opposite of taking the high road is. Vengeance ideation, dreams of getting even (mostly involuntary)… etc. etc.
Having friends to your house for dinner. You can be comfortable, break glasses, listen to whatever you like. The only trade off is not being able to say “we went to poodle over the weekend” to your colleagues in the lunch room come Monday
Watching three great movies in one day, rather than binge watching the new season of outer banks. My mind: nourished. My attention span: growing. Outer Banks: drip fed over the course of a month
That being said, if you occasionally miss free-to-air TV ads, why not include tiktok breaks every ten minutes or so while watching netflix?
#2
Eventually common practice can render any act into the shadows of obscurity. For example, recently I sat in the stair well at my apartment’s rear entrance and smoked a cigarette. Smoking is strictly prohibited on premises, and it didn’t feel as good as I’d hoped to sit alone knowing this was not a done thing. In silence, no bystanders, smoking in the cold concrete stair, I brought my butt inside to throw it in the bin because there aren’t any ashtrays. It hasn’t happened again, although I still imagine a time twenty years ago when the tenants were smoking inside these very walls.
Jump forward a couple months and I’m looking through marketplace for a pair of speakers. I want something vintage, they don’t have to sound ‘good’, just have a unique tone. I come across a pair of Altecs, and decide to research the model before inquiring (I’m not a marketplace time waster). Somehow, I land in a stairwell of the internet.
At first this strange page might look like a contemporary website built by one of those poetic computing kids (they live in SF and go to live coding events), or an artist based in berlin who traverses the line between physical and digital (these are both jabs at myself, though I have never been based in berlin or SF). This is a website which hasn’t been updated since 2011, but someone keeps paying the rent to make sure it’s still live.
It’s not often that one stumbles on a truly dirtstyle website in the wild wild web. Today, most of the net has been swept up in a cloud of smoke, web 3.0 capabilities and, as we’ve recently become aware of, erased altogether. This aesthetic is typically only consumed on wayback machine, by those of us with nothing better to do than look at past versions of websites.
Like a bird watcher catching a glimpse of a rare breed beyond the pages of The Australian Bird Guide, sites of this design exist to us only in net.art anthologies and archives. The edges of the transparent gifs and images appear jagged - reminding me of this stairwell by Olia Lialina. Their mailing list, powered by yahoo, now defunct.
The concept of anti-aliasing is integral to the dirtstyle aesthetic, and in simple terms can be described as the smoothening of digital lines, or upscaling of low resolution videos. Corey Arcangel rejected anti-aliasing before modern browsers began to implement it across the board, and this article explains the concept well if you’re curious.
The rarity of these sites - like an endangered species - allows us to describe online encounters as we might describe a vista, i.e. the green is so green, and the imperfections ignite a sincerity you don’t often find in this modern life, a reprieve from the grayscale and homogenised layouts of web present. Their rarity also inspiring me to write an entire blog post because of such a chance sighting. I had become so used to this aesthetic being documented in the context of net.art, I forgot that the art was referencing an actual web design trend, and not immaculately conceived. Knowing that relics like this still exist brings comfort in an ever glossier digital world.
Family history websites are very representative of this aesthetic!