CAC x rect.repair | Take the Web  to the Park! WebRing Workshop

What happens when a webpage is no longer purely virtual and available 24/7, but becomes site-specific? What if we no longer discover information through search and algorithms, but through wandering, chance encounters, and interactions with others? Can we imagine a network infrastructure that emerges through real-life interactions between people, with each person contributing their own piece of content?

This Sunday, Chronus Art Center and [[rect*]]repair will take you into the park to build a temporary offline network using low-cost hardware, create and deploy your own HTML webpage, and collectively build a site-specific WebRing through wandering, discovery, and connection.

From Webrings to Walled Gardens

In the early days of the World Wide Web, finding information online often felt more like treasure hunting or archaeology than the kind of searching we are familiar with today. Before social media feeds, recommendation algorithms and AI assistants, the Web was messy, personal and often surprising. People discovered websites through hyperlinks, web directories and webrings.

A webring was one of the earliest ways people discovered websites on the World Wide Web. Participating websites displayed a small navigation bar that linked visitors to the “next”, “previous” or “random” site in the ring. A webring was a collection of independently maintained webpages connected through shared interests. Rather than relying on search engines, visitors would move from page to page through a community of interconnected websites.

This extremely simple principle encouraged exploration, serendipity and personal expression, transforming the Web from a collection of isolated islands, or gardens, into a network of relationships. Following links from one page to another could lead you down unexpected paths, from someone’s GIF-laden personal homepage to an obscure hobby project or a piece of poetry. Today, much of our online experience takes place inside an incredibly small number of platforms, or “walled gardens”, where search engines, app stores and recommendation systems increasingly determine what we see and how we discover new content.

This workshop combines the serendipitous experience of discovery from the early Web with low-cost hardware. Using ESP8266 microcontrollers, participants will collectively construct a site-specific, temporary “offline web” distributed throughout Park. Each participant will create their own webpage and connect it to others through hyperlinks, puzzles, stories, clues or artistic interventions. The webpages will be hosted by tiny wireless devices hidden throughout the park, with each page limited to just 2MB of digital space. Pages might disappear and reappear, or require you to physically move closer in order to connect. Together, they will form a temporary webring that can only be explored on-site through wandering, discovery and physical movement.

This workshop is also a joint event between [[rect*]]repair’s Beneath the Interface series and CAC’s summer workshop series, Fragile Infrastructures. Beneath the Interface is a monthly workshop series initiated by [[rect*]]repair around creative tech, bringing people together to learn, experiment, and make things with playful technologies.Fragile Infrastructures offers a structural reflection on contemporary narratives surrounding high-energy cloud computing and artificial intelligence, while exploring ways of re-embedding computation within environmental conditions and planetary-scale ecological constraints.

What we will explore

During the workshop we will offer the technical framework and hardware needed to participate in the offline Webring. Participants will get a short introduction into HTML and construct their own handmade webpage(s). We will challenge the participants through prompts to explore their surroundings and make a hyper-local, site-specific page that expresses both their physical surroundings and the technical implications of an offline (mesh) network through a personal journey, treasure hunt or puzzle (game).

While technical, the workshop will be focussing on how locality, the environment, latency,  technical constraints and unreliable connections can inspire new perspectives on communication and infrastructure. As such, this workshop emphasizes artistic exploration over technical jargon.

Basic familiarity with HTML and/or C++ will be helpful! Participants are encouraged to experiment, explore and collaborate.