art installation by Lenara Verle for Entretempo's Art Garden
This project is a tribute to websites that don’t exist anymore. Some were useful tools, which I used almost daily, but they lost users to better products and died of competition. Some were beloved art sites whose cutting edge technology at the time is not anymore compatible with current equipment and died of obsolescence.
For them, I created small tokens of rememberance, jars with screenshots, wood planks with URLs written on them, and stones engraved with tales of what they were.
The memorials were left at the abandoned section of the cemetery, to be a company to the empty graves and the weed- and cobweb-covered tombstones, a temporary marker in physical space of their ephemeral online lives.
I chose to feature in the memorials six sites to which I had a personal connection.
Altavista was my search engine of choice.
Geocities was a place where anybody could host their website, an invaluable resource when teaching people how to build websites.
Orkut was a social network extremely popular in Brazil, everybody I know was in there.
Beenz was a digital currency. I never used it, it died long before I started my current research into alternative currencies.
Praystation was a beautiful generative art project.
Word Magazine also hosted amazing art, games and experimental projects. (some of them are actually being recoded and in this way resurrected! 🙂
There are about 300 hectar of unused cemetary ground in Berlin’s inner city. This land can be recycled and reclaimed for the living through gardening initiatives.
GRÃœNE LIGA Berlin and ENTRETEMPO KITCHEN GALLERY decided to take action and resume responsibilty for one of this hidden gems: the abandoned cemetary St. Georgen Parochial I.
Based on the experiences of the Matria JardÃn in Oaxaca, Mexico, this project will revive the site by turning it into an art garden, a place of physical and mental recreation and most of all: a place for everyone.
The garden will stay open to new artists and ideas, creating a live space that is in a constant state of regeneration.
As a grassroots-project the Art Garden lives and grows with the people who contribute to it.
The first part of the installation consisted in glass jars and wood sticks that I left at different spots in the cemetery. Some memorials, placed at more “hidden” spots, remained there longer. Others stood at more conspicuos spots and were removed after a few days. They were all meant to be ephemeral, and I also inserted some organic material inside the jars, so the printed screenshots would slowly decompose together with it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The second part of the installation, done after most of the first memorials were gone, was meant to be (slightly) more permanent. This time I wrote the names of the websites, together with their dates of birth and death, on stone slabs. I expect the ink I used to also fade away with time, albeit slowly.
 
 
 
 
 