Click Here…
Switcheristic Telecommunications (Richard Lewei Huang & Yufeng Zhao)

Click Here… is an interactive installation that showcases an archive of early web banner ads in different languages curated from the Wayback Machine. Banner ads are a form of graphical advertisement prevalent on the web in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Widely regarded as a visual nuisance for their gaudy graphics and animations, banner ads nevertheless played an important role in shaping the online experience for early web users worldwide.

Click Here… is composed of a period-appropriate CRT monitor, a computer mouse, and a wall projection. Visitors can click the mouse to browse through banner ad frames centered on the iconic phrase "click here" (or its counterparts in different languages) on the monitor. Each time a new frame is loaded, the wall projection showcases the web page where the banner ad originally appeared. By highlighting the most archetypical phrase in these ads and showcasing the original web pages, Click Here… is both a demonstration of the dot-com era commercial culture and a comparative study of the distinctive characteristics and commonalities of early web design patterns between web pages in different languages. By offering a space to (re)experience the early web’s ethos and aesthetics, Click Here… invites visitors to reflect upon the trending nostalgia of the dot-com era. How should we understand the tension between romanticizing the past web and acknowledging its complex legacy in paving the way for the hyper-surveilled, ad-saturated Internet of today? How can we imagine a web that is more ethical, democratic, and privacy-preserving?



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Switcheristic Telecommunications is a data art and research collective made up of Richard Lewei Huang and Yufeng Zhao. Richard (he/him) is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington Information School. He studies web archiving and internet histories, with a focus on non-English web archives and forensic methods for analyzing archived web content. Yufeng (he/him) is a creative technologist and user experience engineer based in Brooklyn, New York. His work deals with data collection and processing, and explores unexpected connections embedded in our techno-cultural landscape.



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