Lost Internet Art: Animated Doughnut of Human Arms (2010)

Originally found on emiliogomariz.net, a web site that is now removed. I use this graphic to informally check my graphics processor speed.

Vanishing Web Sites

This is an interesting phenomena, that we can create web sites and have them vanish, but they can make a lasting impression and take on a life beyond what we know.

Research indicates that a significant portion of web pages becomes inaccessible over time. For instance, a study by the Pew Research Center found that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible by 2023. This trend is not limited to older content; even pages created in 2023 saw about 8% disappear by the end of that year. Part of this may be due to large social media eating the Internet, taking traffic from individual web sites. Maintaining a web site is a lot more work, it costs more, and it requires more technical knowhow than simply posting on X/twitter, Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, and so on.

Social media platforms face similar challenges; a study of tweets from X (formerly Twitter) showed that nearly 20% of tweets were no longer publicly visible just months after posting. The reasons for these disappearances vary, including content removal by users, account suspensions, or technical issues.

In summary, while websites can create lasting impressions during their operational life, many ultimately vanish, contributing to a fragmented digital landscape. This reality emphasizes the importance of archiving and preserving online content to maintain access to historical information.

Thus, Emilio Gomariz’s endless doughnut wheel of arms may be one of those things that would be forever gone if not for older “librarians” of the net.

News i8 is Partly an Internet Archive

We didn’t set out to become an Internet news archive, it just worked out that way, after spending decades collecting the best of one tech person’s experience of the Internet each day. Internet libraries face significant challenges in the form of copyright claims, but given the decay of the Internet, the urge to save good and interesting content for posterity is understandable. This web site, newsi8, is currently an experiment in recycling and reviving decade old content from an archive of over 10,000 unpublished posts. It’s a hobby. This site itself will one day rot away, but before it does, we hope to create something worth preserving: a digital Noah’s Ark or sorts. The trick is doing it all without becoming a pirate.

If Emilio or the current owner of this image desires it to be removed, contact us via our About page and we will certainly do that. Or we can just update the link to your current site so people can see your other art. We host no ads so this use is educational (about Internet rot), and we believe it is fair to use under the fair use doctrine since there is no market usurpation.

ChatGPT is allowing content revival to happen at pace at this stage in history, but it’s anyone’s guess how long that will last. Despite large search engines ignoring content generated by LLMs, it is still sort of the gold rush days as far as generating new content with text helper tools goes.

Anyway, thanks Emilio for this interesting art!