In her book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, Virginia Heffernan writes, "The Internet is paradigmatic magic. It turns experiences from the material world that used to be densely physical--involving licking stamps, say, or widing clocks or driving in cars to shopping centers--into frictionless, weightless, and fantastic abstractions."
My piece "Forgotten HTTP Request" is in response to Heffernan's idea of magic and loss in the internet age. Everyday, billions of HTTP request packets travel through the Internet to retrieve the webpages that create the magic of the Internet. Although these requests are only bits of data, we describe them with the language that we use to describe physical postage--"packets," "retrieve," "requests," etc. My piece materializes this abstraction by representing an HTTP request as a physical letter, sent from one corner of the world to another and bearing a specific addresss. However, with the advent of digital communication, physical letters are becomming less and less common. My piece also speaks to this sense of loss and nostalgia when we look back on the pre-Internet age. "Forgotten HTTP Request" is a play on the trope of a letter forgotten at the corner of a drawer. Instead of a letter, the HTTP Request itself is being forgotten in a corner of the Internet. I chose to represent the dichotomy of magic and loss with snowfall. After a night of snow, the world of yesterday seems to have been forgotten, burried under a shimmering, magical blanket of snow.
I further the theme of magic and loss with the letter itself. I chose to include these components of an HTTP request on the letter: the request URL, the request method, the "from" address, and the response status code. Using a geolocation API, I was able to retrieve the user's IP address and country, which I display as the "from" address. The response status code, 410, indicates that the webpage that the request is trying to reach is permanently gone, as if forgotten or lost.
With this piece, I aim to explore the sense of nostalgia and loss behind the abstract magic of the Internet.
To view the piece, please use the Chrome browser and click this link: https://mich0608.github.io/Forgotten-HTTP-Request/
◕ ◞ ◕ This project was made using https://netnet.studio