Internet Archive x Gray Area: Trillionth Webpage Net.Art Commissions

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.

Commissioned Artists:

• Chia Amisola
• Spencer Chang
• Sarah Friend & Arkadiy Kukarkin
• Ophira Horwitz
• Mai Ishikawa-Sutton & Raúl Feliz
• Olivia McKayla Ross
• Rodell Warner

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)