Vernacular Web & Intervention

In the reading, I like the page describing the Under Construction sign, particularly the Always Under Construction sign. To me, the Always Under Construction sign is like a cheesy symbol of the internet; I remember seeing an article a few years ago about a group of people who were trying to print out the entire internet, and they were moving steadily along until they realized how exponentially the internet was increasing. All of the sudden, a few thousand pages of printed websites became a speculated few million, then a few billion, and so on. The internet is constantly exploding with new pages, pathways, and pursuits put forth by its millions of users. People joke about reaching the ends of the internet, and I've realized now that that claim is forever unfounded, because the internet will always a project that is always under construction.

I find it depressing that the commonalities of the 90s internet era are becoming the butts of present-day jokes. We think that we were so backwards back then, that we were acting childish by making webpage backgrounds look like starry nights, by putting up flashy rainbow bars at the face of websites, by adorning our pages with midi tracks and silly graphics. I remember the days when I used every ounce of my power into making my Xanga page the coolest of the cool, with the biggest cheesefest of graphics the world has ever seen. Each graphic was like a collectible, and I felt such pride having been able to accumulate so many of them.

I love that the author manages to bring some dignity back to these good ol' days by explaining why we did what we did; we weren't children horsing around with a new toy, we were dreamers experimenting with the possibilities of the web. The author was right in explaining the 90s web as a culture, because it had the good, the bad, and the ugly, and you couldn't help but love it.

Except these ones. They're just frightening.

For the web intervention assignment, I had a few ideas brewing. I'm mostly interested in the digital age's effect on traditional art; being a digital painter by trade, I want to play on the relationship between traditional and digital in art.
I've recently become enamored with glitch art, and I want to create a series of glitch art pieces using classic pieces of art (e.g. Starry Night, Mona Lisa, The Birth of Venus, The Scream, etc) as my bases.
Another idea is to insert pop culture characters into these classical pieces of art, like famous paintings improved by cats
Expounding on that last idea, I'm intrigued with the Anonymous movement, and I want to digitally recreate Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, only with Anonymous leading the internet users.