portal constellation (reviving the webring)

Imagine a cyberspace where we could surf the net between handmade sites rather than constantly being shuffled back through the megastore nodes. Webrings were an interesting early method of creating community between homepage builders through the construction of intentional navigational infrastructure. With this history and fantasy in mind, we are experimenting with methods of linking between each other’s pages as a way of building our own pathways through the net.    - Brenna Murphy

Portal Constellation: Reviving the Webring, was created as part of an online residency with Arebyte On Screen, in consultation with Brenna Murphy, Zaiba Jabbar, Rachel Falconer, and Rebecca Edwards. It is functional webring: a pre-social-media internet navigation framework where websites embed links to each other so that visitors can travel within the ring and explore the sites together. Webrings made the internet accessible without search engines flattening them all into a browseable list, or social media gamifying them into a public clout score, and without a clean constrained interface giving them all the sameness of "products".

installed on [Anti]materia, the website of Doreen Rios

installed on a.pureapparat.us, the website of Xuan Ye

installed on ourmachine.net, the website of Kei Kreutler

installed on dietrichmeyer.info, the website of Dietrich Meyer

installed on verns.world, the website of Vern Avola

installed on rozina.neocities.org, the website of Rozina Aamir