The Offline Website Project (TOWP) is a domestic disruption of the distributed logic of the global web. It is comprised of a series of websites meant to run locally only on the computer where these sites are created and hosted. In order to experience the sites, TOWP users need to physically travel to the home of the artist and participate in a site-specific experiencing of these digital works. TOWP sites are thus unique material objects: non-replicable, non-sharable, non-transferrable; they are ingrained in a place and a concrete home computer. In a way, these digital objects are auratic, in the sense that they evoke pre-mechanical reproduction possibilities (in Walter Benjamin’s terms). Yet their existence is virtual and layered like the digital machine. Domestic constraints imply that TOWP sites will rarely be experienced in their true interactive form and, like with any other performative discipline, access to them is limited to video documentation. For this exhibit, we are sharing one of those videos documenting the experiencing of one of TOWP's sites: “beauty routine (a burning desire)”.

“beauty routine” is a poetic commentary on the possibility of thinking beauty only in local terms, seeing beauty as always pertaining to a physical body. As most of Saum's work, this involves thinking about her own displacement and beauty (as a foreign female body in the USA) and how this relates to the larger spaces she occupies, and the environmental impact of her occupation. Through this exploration, “beauty”, and its sustainability, become active terms, capable of exerting violence to the Earth and its inhabitants. Violence and environmental exploitation are seen in tandem, pondering about the many ways we carry out supposedly harmless actions (online, at home, to our bodies) that have a devastating impact on the physical world (outside, in the natural world). The web, thus, just like a black hole, the Solar System, or the sum total of all the (now burnt) trees in California or the Amazon, is massively distributed in time and space relative to humans, being close to Timothy Morton’s definition of a hyperobject. Hyperobjects, although very different in nature, function and style, have numerous properties in common (they are viscous, molten, phased, interobjective...), but their main characteristic is that they are nonlocal. They are objects so distributed that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. A primary example of this is climate change. “beauty routine (a burning desire)” explores local and nonlocal actions in relation to climate change and proposes the idea that hyperobjects could never be beautiful. What does this mean for online art and literature? What does this say about our own possibilities of being beautiful as we participate in today’s digital networks?

With The Online Website Project, a site’s webiness is stripped from the global network to be rooted, deeply, at home.