This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”
The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”
“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”
Recently felled trees in one of Montreal's most famous parks are getting a makeover — with the trunks of century-old poplars being turned into works of art.
As messed up as this is, why is there no commentary about freedom of expression? It's as if police attitudes have become default "suppress" they seem to have pretty clearly overreacted
If we were to travel 500 years into the future, what would the monuments decorating public parks and town squares commemorate? Thomas Doyle takes us on an unnerving journey to imagine the culture we might encounter should our endless fascination with technology continue.
The New York-based artist (previously) toys with perception as he sculpts miniature works at 1:43 scale and smaller. His new dystopian series, Clear History, invokes classical Greek and Roman sculpture, although the venerated figures appear more as a warning than an ideal. Sharp rays pierce through a woman’s head in “Clickthrough rate,” for example, while the hunched protagonist of “Opt in” demonstrates the neck-cranking posture many of us know all too well.
“Infinite scroll” (2024), mixed media, 22 x 13.8 x 13.8 centimeters
Interested in the long tail of culture, Doyle frequently looks to the past to better understand the consequences of our present. “I’m fascinated by the way we are hurtling toward what seems to be a new way of being human, leaping without looking, hoping for the best,” he says.
In each of the mixed-media scenes, tiny figures peer up at or sit near the weathered statues as they consider a world that’s come and gone. “The trappings of past cultures are all around us, morphed and made nearly unrecognizable over centuries,” the artist adds. “I’ve tried to trace the ways in which today’s technologies will reverberate over time. What will grow from the seeds we plant today? What becomes a venerated symbol? What serves as a cautionary myth?”
Doyle currently has a few models on view at the Ukrainian National Museum in Chicago, and he very generously shares glimpses behind the scenes on Instagram.
“Acceptance criteria” (2024), mixed media, 21 x 15 x 15 centimeters“Opt in” (2024), mixed media, 20 x 20 x 20 centimeters“Switch profile” (2024), mixed media, 20 x 12.5 x 12.5 centimeters“Show hidden” (2024), mixed media, 28 x 30 x 30 centimeters“Session timeout” (2024), mixed media, 25 x 14.5 x 14.5 centimeters“Bad gateway” (2024), mixed media, 20 x 17.5 x 17.5 centimeters“Use case” (2024), mixed media, 20 x 14 x 14 centimeters“Temporary redirect” (2024), mixed media, 21 x 26 x 26 centimeters“We value your privacy” (2024), mixed media, 28 x 17.5 x 17.5 centimeters“Rollback” (2024), mixed media / 20 x 16 x 16 centimeters
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