Exhibition Internet Archive x Gray Area: Trillionth Webpage Net.Art Commissions (2025)

The Internet Archive has reached an extraordinary milestone: the archiving of its trillionth webpage. This civilization-scale achievement marks decades of dedication to preserving the ephemeral nature of digital culture and ensuring universal access to human knowledge. From its founding mission to create a permanent record of the internet's evolution, the Archive has become an essential infrastructure for memory in the digital age, safeguarding 866+ billion webpages, 41+ million books and texts, millions of software programs, images, videos, and audio recordings. To commemorate this historic moment, San Francisco interdisciplinary arts and technology non-profit Gray Area has partnered with the Internet Archive to commission a series of original net.art works that engage with the vast holdings of the Archive and explore what it means to create, preserve, and access culture online. November 1 - December 5, 2025 The Internet Archive 300 Funston Avenue San Francisco, CA 94118 Saturday, November 1, 2025 | 5 PM View event page here. The commissioned artists have drawn from the Archive's expansive collections to create web-based artworks that reflect on themes of memory, digital archaeology, and the human stories embedded within preserved data. These works exist as both online experiences and physical installations at the Internet Archive, bridging the digital and material worlds in ways that honor the Archive's dual nature as both a technological achievement and a profoundly human endeavor. Each artwork offers a unique lens through which to consider questions central to our digital present: How do we make sense of the internet's scale and scope? What narratives emerge when we excavate layers of archived websites, forgotten software, and digitized texts? How does preservation shape our relationship to the past and our imagination of the future? This exhibition celebrates not only the trillionth webpage saved, but also the ongoing work of innovators who help us understand the cultural stakes of digital conservation. By creating works that will themselves be permanently housed within the Internet Archive, these artists contribute to the living archive—adding new layers of creative interpretation to the historical record and leaving behind a footprint for future internet explorers to uncover. Their contributions remind us that archives are not passive repositories but active sites of meaning-making, where the preserved materials of yesterday inspire the creative expressions of today and tomorrow. In engaging with the Archive's collections, these artworks illuminate the richness of human creativity in online spaces, inviting audiences to consider their own place within this vast, interconnected record of our shared experience online. Curated by Amir Esfahani (Internet Archive) and Wade Wallerstein (Gray Area). The Trillionth Webpage Net.Art Commissions are also presented in an online exhibition with digital cultural partners around the world as part of Distant.gallery Festival. In Chia Amisola's Elegiac, hundreds of browser windows unfold on the desktop, weaving a narrative around cultural myths of creation and destruction with the internet's cycles of collapse and repair. Entirely composed from media, sound, and text sourced from the Internet Archive, the generative work presents an ever-changing hypertextual myth out of the stories the internet chooses to tell itself. Throughout their practice, Amisola's sites represent acts of self-preservation in a medium always at risk of disappearance, attempting to make sense of intimate histories and selves amidst what has been collectively preserved and lost. alive internet theory theory is a séance with the Internet, told through tens of millions of digital media files from the Internet Archive. The piece takes visitors on a trip through the life of the web as we created it; every image, video, song, and text was uploaded by a person on the web. This overwhelming sea of human "content" offers a striking contrast to today, where an increasing amount is created solely by AI. At the same time, the piece incorporates the machine’s perspective. Many visual effects were created by asking frontier AI models to reflect on how they would visualize their own experience training on this very data to become human-like. What separates us from the machine and ultimately, what do we consider human? The Lives of Infamous Men is an infinite algorithmic web-based video, where a slightly-edited version of Foucault’s essay of the same name is read by a re-composited American politicians and TV news personalities. The essay is an introduction for a fictional book, proposed but never written, where Foucault collects small snippets of text from the prison archives of the Hópital général and the Bastille from the 17th and 18th centuries. In it, Foucault speculates on the lives of these men: their pathos, melodrama, and ultimately their forgettability - only their brief encounter with the