Netstalgia Not Acceptable

"I Miss the Internet"

Thu 17 Sep 2026 - Thu 17 Sep 2026

In collaboration with Error 417 Expectation Failed, "I Miss the Internet" is a day of workshops, talks and performances that explore how internet memory, nostalgia and platform power shape our understanding of the web past, present and future.

a digital image of green and black render lines flowing between and through each other

Netstalgia Not Acceptable

"I Miss the Internet"

Thu 17 Sep 2026 - Thu 17 Sep 2026

In collaboration with Error 417 Expectation Failed, "I Miss the Internet" is a day of workshops, talks and performances that explore how internet memory, nostalgia and platform power shape our understanding of the web past, present and future.

"I miss the internet" has become a familiar refrain online. Referencing a popular meme, it is nonsensical but evocative: the phrase prompts us to ask what, exactly, "the internet" refers to. What is being mourned is something more elusive: is it the "old internet", an imagined internet that never fully materialised, or a projection from a future in which today's internet has already become history?

Rather than accepting this internet nostalgia at face value, I Miss the Internet asks what this longing actually reveals. Bringing together artists, researchers and practitioners, this day-long programme examines and reimagines the uneven distribution of power embedded in internet standards and infrastructures. The invited contributors recover overlooked figures in internet history, expose and subvert deeply rooted hierarchies, investigate the political and material continuities of network technologies, develop alternative tools that account for the environmental costs of digital systems, and question the inherited conservative logics that continue to shape online spaces.

Together, the programme asks how internet histories might move beyond netstalgia to become critical tools for imagining more equitable futures.

 

Programme

netstalgia not acceptable

Workshop: Olia Lialina – A Day in One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. Last Updated April 27, 2009.

11am-3pm, £8/5

This workshop offers participants the opportunity to explore the early web through the unique interface of the GeoCities Research Institute, an ongoing digital art and archiving project that explores, preserves, and showcases early web vernacular culture using a massive 1-terabyte dataset of rescued GeoCities websites, guided by net artist and vernacular web researcher and keeper of the archive Olia Lialina

Working with this archive, participants will investigate thousands of webpages mistakenly dated "Last Updated April 27, 2009" during the archiving process. Rather than relying on distant reading or algorithmic analysis, the workshop invites participants to reconstruct the histories of these pages through close observation, memory and interpretation. Together, participants will ask: How do we recognise the age of a website? What makes something feel "old" online? And what kinds of knowledge emerge when we slow down and read the web on its own terms? 

Participants should bring a laptop with Firefox installed.

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Discussion: Netstalgia Not Acceptable

3-4pm, pay what you can

The idea of a singular lost internet obscures the many histories, infrastructures and unequal power relations that have always shaped networked technologies. Netstalgia often produces a flattened, idealised image of the past, one that can itself become exploitable, mobilised by platforms and companies that profit from our desire for authenticity, community and perceived simplicity.

Join a panel including Olia Lialina and Winnie Soon for this round table discussion exploring how internet memory, nostalgia and platforms shape our understanding of the web.

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Open Tabs Club - The Web We Want

6-8pm, £8/5

Featuring Dana Dawud, Lenyx Dickey, Mariana Marangoni, Lola Odelola, Lucia Rebolino and more.

Join us for a series of short presentations and performances exploring alternative internet histories and futures.
Through performance lectures, let’s play, sound performances, live demonstrations and other experimental formats, invited artists and researchers examine the uneven distribution of power embedded in internet standards and infrastructures. Together, they recover overlooked histories, challenge dominant narratives and imagine more equitable digital futures.

 

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Participants

Error 417 Expectation Failed

Error 417 Expectation Failed is an independent foundation supporting radically contemporary Internet art and net-based arts practices. We encourage open-ended formats, risky projects and explorative artworks that engage critically with contemporary technology. Our focus lies on art that addresses the frictions between technology, aesthetics, politics and social relations to challenge power structures — one hack, glitch, fail, error, process and experiment at a time.

Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene - an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century, her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, "net.language" and vernacular web - in both artistic and publishing projects - has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory.

Lola Odelola

Lola Oledola is a multidisciplinary artist and technologist. She contributes to open standards through various W3C groups and serves on the W3C Technical Architecture Group as an invited expert. Lola is currently using photography and creative writing to explore themes that come up in her technical work.

Lucia Rebolino

Lucia Rebolino is an artist, architect, and computational designer. She conceives her practice as a space where different branches of science and design can conceptualize, critique, and visualize new aesthetics, drawing attention to complex and invisible systems. She is a researcher with Forensic Architecture in London, focusing on environmental justice investigations. Her work on prediction and climate models has been featured in e-flux and exhibited at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale (2025) and the Busan Museum of Art in South Korea (2026). Her research-based artistic practice explores technology-driven performances, and she has lectured at international institutions including MoMA, MediaLab Matadero, Columbia University, the Royal College of Art, and ETH Zurich.

Lenyx Dickey

Lenyx Dickey (they/them) is a Black queer computational media artist based in Charlotte, NC. Their practice exists at the intersection of code, care, and culture. As a self-taught programmer with over six years of experience, they founded the Black Sex Worker Reparation Fund and teach workshops for The Rouge Support Network. Lenyx’s artistic practice explores themes of digital archiving, queer storytelling, and speculative systems. They strive to investigate how code can preserve marginalized histories and create new forms of kinship.

Mariana Marangoni

Mariana Marangoni is a Brazilian artist, researcher, and lecturer in MA Interaction Design at the London College of Communication. Her work utilizes installations and visual poetry to explore media materiality, the aesthetics of decay, and unconventional computational paradigms. Currently a PhD student at the UAL Creative Computing Institute, Mariana has exhibited and presented her research internationally at venues such as the V&A, Ars Electronica, and Transmediale. She is a core member of the Critical Climate Computing Research Group at UAL.

Dana Dawud

Dana Dawud is an artist and writer whose practice moves between film, montage, and sound design, navigating the fluidity of internet cinema across both online and offline spaces. Her work traces ruptures and reverberations in contemporary culture, often taking shape as experimental moving-image projects that resist closure and evolve through mutation and accumulation.

Winnie Soon

Winnie Soon is a Hong Kong-born artist coder and researcher interested in the cultural implications of digital infrastructure that addresses wider power asymmetries with a particular interest in computational publishing, queering code and software. Their artistic and scholarly works engage with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals, digital censorship and minor technology. With works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and alternative written forms, including co-written books titled Publishing as Collective Infrastructure (forthcoming 2026), Boundary Images (2023), Fix My Code (2021), and Aesthetic Programming* (2020), Winnie is also the co-editor of the Software Studies Book Series (MIT Press).

"I Miss The Internet" is supported by Error 417 Expectation Failed