1. Browsers don’t really load websites; they perform them. A website's code, like a Bach cantata's sheet music, instructs the browser on which notes to play. The website doesn’t appear until a browser has displayed it to a user, interpreted the code in all its complex harmonies and rhythms. - ThreadSky

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johnwest.bsky.social • 48 days ago

1. Browsers don’t really load websites; they perform them. A website's code, like a Bach cantata's sheet music, instructs the browser on which notes to play. The website doesn’t appear until a browser has displayed it to a user, interpreted the code in all its complex harmonies and rhythms.

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johnwest.bsky.social•48 days ago

2. Different user settings make for different performances. And, now, more and more, servers yield different data for different audiences. The website, unfixed, remakes itself uniquely for each user who sees it.

johnwest.bsky.social•48 days ago

3. This idea—the website as performance—comes in part from the technologist @ashleyblewer.com's digital performance, THROTTLED (2020). In it, she forces the browser, painfully slowly, to load animated GIFs from the early web.

johnwest.bsky.social•48 days ago

4. “The performance is theoretically repeatable, but if your browser has taken it upon itself to cache the content (this is likely), it means that the piece is not repeatable,” Blewer writes. “You can’t go back in time.”

johnwest.bsky.social•48 days ago

5. This is the heart of ephemeral media: you can’t go back in time. Much like a word—”a word is dead / when it is said,” Emily Dickinson writes—websites only last as long as the tab is open. Then they change, rot away. But Dickinson also writes that a word "just / begins to live / that day."

johnwest.bsky.social•48 days ago

_ Ashley Blewer's piece, THROTTLED (2020): https://ashleyblewer.com/throttled.html.
_ Emily Dickinson's poem: https://monadnock.net/dickinson/word.html.
_ My blog post: https://wildempty.wordpress.com/2025/01/15/a-website-is-a-performance/.

ashleyblewer.com•46 days ago

ahhh!! 🎵🎶

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