The landing page is a galaxy brimming with pixelated stars. Pink glitter letters shimmering invitingly declare: Welcome to My Homepage!
The digital residency program, hosted by the Museum of Human Achievement, started as a dollhouse-shaped website, a project storage space for MoHA’s Director of Digital Arts, Rachel Stuckey.
“The attic of the house was always the guest room, because I liked the idea of having a space of a website where I would invite friends to kind of stay and put whatever they wanted in that part of the house,” Stuckey says. “The space was really skeuomorphic at the time. So it was a room that had a chair and different objects. And when someone moved out, I would delete their objects and put them back how it was, treating it like a real space.”
Shaping the internet to mimic physical realities feels particular, now, to a time when GeoCities and NeoPets dominated the zeitgeist, before the form and flow of webpages took on the cookie-cutter architecture driven by capitalist interest and click-based research.
Stuckey’s attic room evolved into a formal residency program, and the Welcome to My Homepage landing page morphed into a more cosmological organization. Through a wooden door, floating securely in the center of the page, you can visit WTMH’s current digital resident.
In April and June 2025, that resident is kama rose, an indigenous artist, writer, and researcher based in California. Her project, “currentarchive”, traces her family’s history of diaspora from their ancestral home of Bahweting in Michigan, through her great-great grandmother’s dislocation to a residential school in Kansas, to rose’s own upbringing in Northern California. The map rose created moves in a nonlinear flow through voice memos, photographs, artworks, academic articles, and hyperlinked statements.
“Telling that story, belonging to all of those places and in-between them, through the internet allowed it to remain wide and untethered,” rose says, pointing to the work of other indigenous internet archivists and activists like Paula Giese.
Projects like rose’s reexamine the internet as a tool of transmission and communication among disparate communities. Though it wasn’t that long ago that these tenants were at the core of current monoliths like Facebook, communication and knowledge transmission on the internet now feels laden with advertisements and misinformation. What’s more, we’re accustomed to webpages that function similarly to one another and design choices that quickly become ubiquitous across the most-visited webpages.
“I often think about how the internet now feels limited to about a handful of social media platforms. It’s come to the point where surfing the web for net art feels both archaic but inherently experimental,” says Austin-based digital artist Celine Lassus.
Lassus used her time as a WTMH resident to imagine a ‘build-a-web’ workshop prompting users to create a better internet through a point-and-click dress-up game reminiscent of online arcade games in the early Aughts. Instead of dressing a Barbie-modeled doll, players adorn a gender-ambigious figure in “cyborg-chic” internet motifs. The exercise, Lassus hopes, helps players imagine an internet centered around autonomy, equity, and play.
“[It’s] a demand for digital care and accountability and an acknowledgment that there shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all web experience,” Lassus says. “Traveling to a custom url that isn’t dominated by Big Tech has become a refusal to the extraction that we’re forcibly fed.”
Laura Cañas, an illustrative artist based in Austin, was similarly drawn to early-internet nostalgia and the freedom of expression and connection that the first blogs, chatrooms, and messaging systems embodied. Using her linocut printmaking as an aesthetic framework, Cañas’ WTMH project established an alternative economy titled “Classifieds for Poets” that reads like LinkedIn from a dimension centered on environmental empathy. Cañas sees her residency as part of a coexisting core of human-driven internet pages.
“There have always been people developing resources and virtual spaces where the main subject is the personal experiences and the relations that are being created. They might be more hidden today, but they are still there,” she says.
The elephant in the digital room generating more fodder for human-centered internet relations to hide behind is, of course, artificial intelligence. OpenAI and image generators now dominate the conversation around the internet and art – and much of the conversation around use of the internet in general. Many voices have risen to criticize AI’s usurpance of human-to-human internet interaction and its entanglement in digitally produced art forms. For net artists and online creators, the question of AI – if and how to use it – can become an art in and of itself.
Local interdisciplinary artist Betelhem Makonnen used the residency as an opportunity to play with the tensions surrounding technology and AI. Working alongside fellow Austin-based creator Mayet and Austria-based performer Mihret Kebede, Makonnen created a “blessings generator” that recreates a version of mirikat, an Ethiopian coffee ceremony centered around exchanges of spiritual and poetic well-wishes.
“My work with the ‘blessings generator’ is an attempt to (mis)use AI technology – to subvert its tendency to replace human connection, and instead facilitate and enhance it,” Makonnen emails. “The magic is in the hope that a simple, digitally delivered blessing, distilled from a real human intention and interfaced through AI, can be an antidote to the anxieties of our time and a reminder that we can root for one another and wish each other well.”
Art gives internet users a chance to dissect and reexamine technology and the systems that encase innovation. AI’s sensationalism and tech corporations’ insistence on mass adaptation can be reformed in the hands of intentional manipulation by net artists like those WTMH showcases.
“The internet is a tool, and like any tool, its value is in how we use it. It can be a source of distraction and disconnection, but it can also be a powerful platform for building community, for sharing stories, and for reminding ourselves of our inter-connectivity,” says Makonnen.
For those exhausted by digital diligence – worn down by targeted advertisements and wary of deep fake photographs and misappropriated art – MoHA’s WTMH residency program offers a space to celebrate what made the internet fun and magical in the first place, and the work that continues to resist corporate interests and AI overuse.
“My relationship with my computer and the internet can become so boring and so quotidian,” Stuckey says, reflecting on the ethos behind the residency program. It revolves around an ever-answerable question: “How can I make more reminders to myself that [the internet] is also a space for creativity and play and for magical encounters to happen?”
Welcome to My Homepage! accepts new residents every month. Applications are currently open through July 1, 2025.
This article appears in June 13 • 2025.
