J.R. Carpenter, A Handmade Web

- “The term ‘handmade’ usually refers to objects made by hand or by using simple tools rather than machines. The results may be homely… or exquisite.” - “I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software…”

Carpenter’s explanation of a handmade web is genuinely interesting. In a way it’s sort of an oxymoron, because how “handmade” can a website be? After all, a website must live digitally. It is something to think about, the dichotomy between creating with your hands using a tool, or using your hands to operate a tool that creates something.



** Olia Lialina, A Vernacular Web (2005), a description of the web during the mid-90s:

bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer... it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.



- “The handmade web emerged at a time when print and digital enjoyed a more symbiotic relationship.”

In the girth of his essay, J.R. Carpenter loosely compares ‘handmade web’ to a map, writing off archives or artifacts of a dead webpage as poor practice. The handmade web is more personal and inclusive. It requires manual labor and a more personal connection.

Carpenter also claims, ironically, handheld devices have pushed us further away from a handmade web. Personally, I don’t wholly agree. Times change, and just like the introduction of the computer, we will continue to progress technologically and new devices will arise. That does not mean we can’t take a step back from them and find ways to go back to our roots… How can we make handmade apps? How can we make the phone or the iPad handmade?

- “In today's highly commercialised web of multinational corporations, proprietary applications, read-only devices, search algorithms, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects.” - “The more proprietary, predatory, and puerile a place the web becomes, the more committed I am to using it in poetic and intransigent ways.”