3n Design

In 2024 I, along with a lot of other people, started to realize that a lot of the open web had started to disappear. Corpo overlords had taken down multiple news sites and science journals, but my awakening was smaller and more personal.

My husband was curating an exhibition, in it he was going to recreate a massive sculpture by our late friend Steve Roden. Steve was my entry point into making the kind of art I do, to say he was a huge inspiration would be an understatement. I was a super-fan well before we ever met, this was back in the 00’s when I lived in Seattle.

My husband was looking for additional funding and Steve has shown at a ton of art spaces in Seattle when I lived there, so I though they might have some insights into funders that would help. I started a deep dive, I knew that a lot of the spaces had closed, but I assumed the websites would remain and might have contact info. To my horror all of them were gone.

That was the age of Flash, so its understandable that once Flash died and the Organization behind it was gone, that there would be no one to rebuild it. But it means there is an entire decade of Seattle art world history that is just gone. Some of my most important early exhibitions happened at these spaces. This led me to think about Steve’s own site, I had built it for him in 2012, and he had stopped updating it in 2016 shortly before he got sick, so it was in serious danger.

All of this led me to conceive of Substratum. The idea is an organization that compliments the Wayback Machine, where most of the sites I mentioned are preserved… if you remember the URL. But the archives exist outside the open web, so all the links to those sites have long broken and begun to rot. The Idea of Substratum is to save the sites before thy go offline, so all those links and their relationship to to webs as a whole are also preserved.

I started by experimenting on a number of websites I have been hosting for years that I would like to see live on, but I did not necessarily want to maintain a CMS for. Could I create simplified HTML/CSS/JS versions that preserve the user experience and the hyperlinks structure, but have no working parts on the back end to be hacked or erode and are host-able with minimal intervention? I succeeded with all the test sites, but could I do it with a more challenging site that also had real stakes?

To prove that this could be done on such a site, I embarked on preserving Steve’s site. It was perfect because Steve was lovingly bad at using the site. His whole discography would be categorized in one way accept for 2 releases that are 5 years apart. Multiple other pages had similar idiosyncrasies. But after a lot of tested I was able to make our perfect copy that to a user or someone linking to it acted exactly as the old WordPress site did, but without the outdated WP install that often kept me up at night worrying it would be hacked.

Once I had enough proof-of-concept sites, I reached out to Fulcrum Arts for fiscal sponsorship so I could start fundraising, because the conversion is only part of the problem.

For this to work, I need to create an organization that can also take over the domain registration and hosting. These are the often forgotten assets that, when an organization sunsets, are paid out for a few years, but when they come up for renewal, the board has dissolved and there is no one left to maintain them. At this point the domain is lost, the content is lost, and the site disappears taking that history and all the links to and from it down with it.

My idea here is for Substratum to takeover the domain registration and hosting of the streamlined version of the site. That way Substratum can make sure the domains is only used for the site it was intended for, and does not get stolen by a spammer after it goes back on the market.

I am still in the early phase of developing this project, but I hope to ramp it up in the coming years and start to save websites at a greater and greater rate. I am currently doing it all in my free time pro-bono and all donations go to maintaining our existing index of sites. If you would like to support the project you can donate here.