The internet seems to be the world’s hard drive. Bye-bye photographs – there’s a copy on Facebook; bye-bye documents – there’s a copy on GoogleDocs. Zach Gage sought to play with the seeming permanence of web data by creating a site that marginally changes with every unique visitor – ultimately becoming a blank page:
Unlike personal data however, data on the internet has a seemingly infinite shelf-life. Between search-engine caching, cloud-hosting, re-blogging, plagiarizing, and the way-back machine, the net collects and eternally stores vast amounts of information.
Temporary.cc eschews this paradigm. For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.
Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it.
As Heraclitus observed, “You can not step twice into the same river” – the river is constantly flowing, constantly changing, therefore the water flowing past your feet 1 minute ago is not the same water as right now. There’s also that part of all of us that likes to make our presence known to future frequenters of a location (e.g. “Tony wuz here 6/12/98″ etched into a park bench) Of course Zach Gage has a much cooler, more interactive way of demonstrating the ever-changing river/bench that we know as the internet.
Make a difference here: Temporary.cc