Assignment #3:

create a poetic website

  • BARNACLES AND SURFBOARDS SWIMMING IN THE INTERNET↓↓↓

    • In 1992, librarian Jean Armor Polly coined the term "surfing the internet" to express an experience of fun and playfulness, but also chaos, at times danger, and requiring proper endurance.

    In "The Barnacles" (2025), artist Yehwan Song imagines contemporary internet users, who passively consume limited information, as surfers who have helplessly sunk beneath the water, now become barnacles that cling to large structures and passively receive the tides.

    The experience of internet browsing has been drastically disrupted by platform capitalism. What was fun and playful and chaotic and dangerous became standardised, smooth, and safe to navigate -- the same way it is safer to board a cruise ship than a pedal boat.

    Poetic-web is the pedal boat: an artistic practice of reimagining the internet in a new metaphorical language that brings back friction, playfulness, and poetic imagination.

    The question posed for this assignment is: how are you swimming in the internet?

    You can:

  • use this question as an inspiration for more specific, poetic questions: "in which style am I swimming", "did I swallow some seawater?"
  • jump to conclusions immediately: "I'm afloat", "I'm drowning", "I'm holding my breath"
  • use or create new metaphors: are you a surfer, a barnacle, or perhaps something else?
  • digress and speculate. E.g.: in which body of water are you swimming? Is it an ocean, a lake, a puddle, a swimming pool, a clogged kitchen sink?

    • In general, use a poetic approach where metaphoric and imaginative language, rather than direct and literal, lead your idea. This should stem from your own experience of the internet! Then, turn this idea into a website.

    Upload your HTML documents and assets in a repository in Codeberg (here's how to). Also, make sure you accompany the work with a 150-200 words-long paragraph about