LO-1 is a multimedia art project, set inside a world where the history of the internet is similar to our own but the internet is instead a physical world we discovered, explored and inhabited. Set up as a fictitious museum exhibit, the installation offers a limited glimpse inside this story via traditional and digital painting, schematics, fictional didactic panels, and in-world ephemera. LO-1's story deliberatly mirrors the sometimes fantastical and idealized tales of the American old west, as well as the romanticization of early Australian settlers, but with an aesthetic and utopian ideal inspired by the early cyberpunk art scenes that spread across the internet in the 90s and early 2000s. Much like these early colonial tales, the history of the internet is sometimes grayer and more challenging than the idealized view that is sometimes assigned to it.
In contrast to the history LO-1 reflects, the world wide web as we know it today has been condensed into all but a few monolithic sites that now hold the keys to the global online community; run by algorithms that have a directed focus on profit over individual freedom. Websites that were once simply built and maintained by idealistic individuals are now complicated machines run by corporations, specifically curated by algorithms and focus-engineered to a fault; beyond the scope of any individual to compete with. In the early days of the internet there existed a techno-libertarian, utopian ideal that the internet would become a tool for free information and self-governmentization, where all participants would be equal in rights to broadcast and share. This early ideal welcomed an era of creative freedom and expression that, even in a more cynical form, still exists in the online world.
