I remember one very long day at the gallery that is situated in a shopping mall. The music was especially loud that day, and the charity-chuggers opposite me were screaming and shouting and clapping and laughing and using manipulation techniques as they followed unsuspecting customers into shops. The ‘customers’ themselves were challenging and two men, on separate occasions, with phones attached to their heads, kicked my paintings because they didn't notice them as they ran towards me looking for the Apple Store.

I tried to work on some research, but every website greeted me with a cookie-warning, and a ‘please subscribe’ pop-up, and a ‘google sign in’ pop-up. So I went to YouTube and was faced with loud, unskippable ads and AI generated narration. I then went to get a small coffee with oat-milk and was charged almost £5 (about $6.50) for a coffee that was not that special.

So the day ended, and I walked out of the mall — the music could still be heard from the street — and sat in my favorite hotel lobby to decompress. There, the television showed the looping newsreel as I sat and looked at photos of old abstract art from the 1940s and 50s.

What does this have to do with HTML and website styles? Well, sometimes we need to switch off from the constant stimulation and, since I spend a lot of time online for my business, I like to go to text only websites that have a few images; a nostalgic harkening-back to the days of the small web. A time when you had to read the newspaper for an exhibition review, rather than waiting and hoping for an instant ‘like’ on a social media platform. And it's not just nostalgia, it is a way of reclaiming the space to expand; reclaiming the peace to allow one to go ‘in’; reclaiming a way of life that was truly interactive.

Even this simple page is deliberately written in HTML from the 90s and technically does not validate according to modern web standards. I have even used an HTML table to lay this page out — oh the horror! At the bottom of this page is a link to the main site and you can choose to have the modern style or enjoy this coded memorabilia. Even my styled site though does not have cookie banners or subscribe pop-ups — it has a simple RSS feed that you can anonymously subscribe to. I don't even use analytics or tracking, so I have no idea who is actually reading this — and that's kinda nice; although I have included on this page only an old fashioned page-view counter for that nostalic touch.

Enjoy this nostalgic garden, for I may just plant some more retro-seeds and see what grows.

Remember this? ↓