A personal digital archive by Avi Flombaum
Old websites. Photos. Source code. Things I made, things I saved, things I forgot I still had.
This is Avichive: twenty years of digital life, slowly put back together.
Come have a lookAvi + archive. You get it.
my little corner of the internet
tweets in the clouds, 2009
painting with video, 2014
Turns out later is now.
A lot of files.
A little time machine.
01 / The origin story
A familiar situation
backup / backup-old /
backup-final / final-final
Somewhere in here is a life.
Old computers became old hard drives. Old hard drives became backups of backups.
I’d accumulated twenty years of files across hard drives, USB sticks, and the cloud. Millions of them. Photos next to code next to old websites, with no good way to see what was actually there.
When I indexed it all, about half the storage turned out to be duplicates. But tucked among the copies were things worth opening again: my early personal website, a Twitter wall from a trade show, a video experiment built in a day.
So I started making an archive. First to find things. Then to understand them. And, whenever possible, to make them work again.
A work in progress, by Avi Flombaum ↗
02 / Open to the public
The larger archive is personal.
These pieces are here for everyone.
Before feeds, there was
your own little website.
My early home on the web: daily journal entries, stories, photos, AIM chats, and the comments people left. Rebuilt from its original Microsoft Access database, with plenty of the old internet still showing.
Visit flombaum.com
An actual relic from the original site.
When a room full of tweets
felt like the future.
A live Twitter wall I built at Designer Pages for NeoCon in Chicago. Tweets floated across the screens, and every tweet was a raffle ticket. The restored version replays the surviving 2009 conversation.
Watch TweefleClouds included, of course.
What if you could
paint with video?
Hannah Sawtell and I made this Vine collage tool in one day for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven at the New Museum. Drag, layer, and blend six-second videos into something new.
The original Vines are gone. A new montage using Knicks footage and a working sandbox let you try the idea again.
Play with Sawbaum
03 / Under the hood
Behind the old websites is a system for finding, understanding, and preserving what’s on those drives. Here’s the short version.
For the wonderfully curious.
Filed under: still here
Thanks for looking around.
Find me over at avi.nyc