My first creative endeavors (as an adult) were not drawings or paintings.
It was the early web that made me pick colors by hand and stitch together HTML code snippets.
The web of the early 2000s was a very different place from the modern social media era, built from many small independent sites and blogs, often quirky and eccentric. Other thinkers have articulated this better than I ever could. The Cluetrain Manifesto was my internet philosophy bible.
This blog is my way of trying to keep these traditions alive. I am present on a few social networks, but here is my true home on the web since 2012. It is part of a tangle of other websites that – as I said myself – “ebb and flow”. Quoting myself:
Like living organisms, like seasons, like universes in a crazy cosmological model my websites breathe. Growing bigger, growing more tentacles and connections, categories, FAQs, lists and explanations … then shrinking and withering again to enigmatic and confusing experiments, borderline artistic.
This quote is from a post Connectedness and Independence – a brief history of some of those websites of mine. I do not want to repeat all that, but celebrate a little milestone: I feel, the elkemental web universe has reached some stability.
All those very old sites unrelated to WordPress have found their final home in a time capsule. I had re-written the code for them a few times from scratch as if I had great plans with them. The journey has been the reward. (The time capsule and access information are hinted at if you add a non-existing URL to elkement.art)
The site in the time capsule is entangled better than any complex quantum mechanical state: It contains not only my primordial web writings on sites formerly hosted on subversiv.at, but also the Chief Engineer’s early site and a frozen version of our business site.
I had built a tool to parse the backups of our WordPress sites and transform the posts to a special format I invented for our sites, and I imported all the posts on elkement.blog (now .art) and our so-called business blog. So, the old site(s) contained all we have ever written on the web, in HTML or with a true content management system.
The German “business blog” had sometimes been confused with a private fun blog. We were telling the stories of two fearless “settlers” building their heat pump system and encountering all kinds of challenges. To our utmost surprise we did get mail from other potential settlers and aspiring heat pump system self-builders. So, we were then featuring “customer references” on this blog.
At some point, this blog has run its course as well as the heat pump part of our business. I figured the frozen obfuscated time capsule would be the best way to keep it somewhat alive as a reference. The most dedicated settlers actually managed to unlock the time capsule, so that plan worked!
I cannot fully explain why, but at the beginning of the new year I felt I needed to bring it back to where it always has lived, fully unearthing the time capsule!
So, our German posts are here again at:
It does not make sense to publish this on my English blog. But in the spirit of the early internet full of explorative, experimental, and self-referential blog posts I want to add this piece of personal web history to my personal web archive here!
If you came to this post searching actually for something heat-pump-related: This (elkement.art) blog also has pre-2019 articles about the heat pump system, just not as many and as detailed.
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I took the frozen blog live again at about the same time I transformed the rebuilt Cathedral of Math. This drawing has significance for me: It was the culmination of my struggle with various drawing techniques in 2024, and I pulled it from the jaws of defeat several times. (I suppose, there must be some metaphorical relation to reviving the antique blog?)
But I could not protect the cathedral from the dangers of UV photons: The image has been under glass, but it is already starting to fade. Recalling test results for the lightfastness of markers, this was to be expected.
Fortunately, I had scanned it early, so it can live on as prints! I have finally manage to introduce it also to my new shop, as a canvas print with specially designed edges!
This is how mathematics looks to me. It also captures the vibe and the fascination of the early web for me!
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