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 experimental and playful and chaotic and dangerous became standardised, smooth, and "safe".

    There's a poetic catch here: metaphors. James Bridle writes of technology as "not mere tool making and tool use: it is the making of metaphors. In making a tool, we instantiate a certain understanding of the world that, thus reified, is capable of achieving certain effects in that world". Think of the "web", the "net", "surfing", "navigating", "virus", "bugs". These are all metaphors.

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

    The underlaying suggestion is to create your own nautical metaphor. 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). Alternatively, you can compress your website folder and send a ZIP file.