upon receiving this brief, the first thing i did was make a spreadsheet, which, in hindsight, was a really bad way to box me into certain themes and ideas. this was my original list of references; i threw every reference that felt even vaguely relevant into it. nostalgia texts, internet culture essays, visual culture theory, practice-based projects.

i also added a column called “scale”: macro for references that speak broadly about culture and history, micro for ones that are more inward-focused, about particular traces and particular people rather than big sweeping arguments.

i think i thought organising the references would make me feel like i had a plan. it did not make me feel like i had a plan. what i actually had was a huge list of things i’d half-read and no idea how any of them connected to each other or to what i was making. i kept staring at it hoping it would tell me something.

i genuinely could not articulate what my project was about beyond “memory i guess??”

the thing is, and i only realised this much later, the spreadsheet actually was telling me something. when i looked at which references i kept returning to, which ones felt urgent rather than just academically relevant, they were almost all the micro ones. cameron’s world, which is about recovering specific geocities pages made by specific anonymous people. lialina, who writes about what the internet remembers and forgets about ordinary people who were never famous. steyerl on specific degraded images. the macro texts kept sliding off my project. they didn’t have anywhere to grip.

i do think that the spreadsheet also helped me look inward and define my positionality; that it was always on the micro scale; first-person testimony instead of sweeping theories.

but i couldn’t see that yet. i just saw a spreadsheet and a deadline.

at my tutorial, i tried to explain what i was working on and it came out as word soup. my tutor zarna listened and then told me to take a step back. stop looking at the objects, she said. look at what’s underneath them. what connects the lotus pond and the tamagotchi and the nintendo ds?

i said memory. she said look further.

she recommended two texts: the internet does not exist edited by aranda, wood and vidokle, and the internet exists on planet earth by mindy seu.

i went away and read both, and something cracked open. the devices i’d been drawing from memory weren’t just objects. they were all portals — the nintendo ds had pictochat, the flip phone had a browser, the ipod had a music store. and the internet i was reaching through those portals was a completely different internet to the one that exists now.