Idiots Delight with Laurie Anderson

A "quiet, intimate, stimulating" chat between Laurie Anderson and radio host Vin Scelsa from 1995, along with the audio commentary by Vin Scelsa 11 years later. This is 'Idiot's Delight Redux' on WFUV Radio  (formerly on WXRK), nicely preserved in the radio station's internet archive. Back in April 1995, after the closing night of 'Nerve Bible' at the Neil Simon Theatre, Laurie went right into the studio for this conversation.

It's hilarious, it's neat, it's multilayered - a real gem; touching on such a wide range of subjects that it almost seems unuseful to list them here... Nevertheless, I mention just some of them: the pair of animal songs on Bright Red, how it felt to be a five-year-old, the story behind 'Duets on Ice', the Houdini-style photo shoot by Annie Leibowitz, Laurie Anderson as a cheerleader (!), what's worth risking your life for, John Cage, experimenting with silence on the radio, (unlike) Van Gogh, computer animation, 'Angel Fragments' ('Wings of Desire' soundtrack), and 'Hey ah', "another frozen north story" read by Laurie live from the Nerve Bible (originally appeared on United States Live). What more can I say - highly recommended.

• Idiot's Delight Redux on WFUV (audio length: 108 mins 50 secs)

Link kindly provided by Timeiswide - thank you, T.

Just hit slash slash dotcom... - Part Three

This is the last third of the list of URL-s from Laurie Anderson's Nerve Bible Tour in 1995, originally typed in by Alan Lasky, updated by Mnemosyne in 2010.



25. Some Things Are Just Pictures Never Change, Part Two

• http://www.geom.umn.edu/apps/gallery.html -- A Gallery of Interactive On-Line Geometry ( http://www.geom.umn.edu/apps/ )

Working and fine in 2010, this website has been intact since, hm, 1997?



26. Wish You Were Here

• http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/guide/www.guide.html -- An html guide ( http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/handbook/handbook.html )
• http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/movies/techinfo.html-- Honolulu Community College Movies

This is what Honolulu Community College's startpage used to look like back in 1999.



27. "Comics for the hardcore geek"

• http://www.interaccess.com/netboy.html -- Stafford Huyler's NetBoy ( http://netboy.com/ )

Supposedly one of the very first webcomics, NetBoy has been online since 1994. NetBoy is a stick figure and, according to Wikipedia, an "Internet innocent with his greatest joy in life being fast .GIFs".



28. The World Where Magic Returned to

• http://www.ip.net/shadowrun/ -- ShadowRun on the World Wide Web

Embarrassing or not, Mnemosyne needed to look up ShadowRun in Wikipedia. The original website of this role-playing game is no longer available even in Teh Internet Archive. Here is the current official ShadowRun website (as of 2010).



29. Fine Art Forum at MSU

• http://www.msstate.edu/Fineart_Online/home.html-- Fine Art Forum Home Page

The current website of Fine Art Forum at Mississippi State University can be found here in 2010.

30. Mother of Interactive Web Browsers

• http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/MetaIndex.html-- An index of Mosaic sites

One of the very first graphical web browsers, Mosaic used to rule the Internet world between 1993 and 1997. This ancestor of numerous notable characteristics of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.



31. Earth Observation from Above

• http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/img-dmsp.html -- DMSP Sample Imagery ( http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/ )

Defense Meteorological Satellite Program "designs, builds, launches, and maintains satellites monitoring the meteorological, oceanographic, and solar-terrestrial physics environments". Under the "Items of Interest" menu, you can see, for example, imagery of a lunar eclipse from satellite altitude, or a 'night map' of power outages caused by Hurricane Katrina, and many more.



32. World-Class Online Experience of...?

• http://www.nra.org -- The NRA's home page (National Rifle Association)

Err, Chuck Norris campaigning for US citizens' participation in the next elections, so as they elect legislators who support gun license? Did the creators of the advertisement forget that it's the guns that need a license to get held by Chuck Norris and not the opposite?

33. Where Discoveries Begin

• http://www.nsf.gov/ -- National Science Foundation World Wide Web Server

National Science Foundation is "a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering". (source: Wikipedia)

34. An Alternative Way of Searching

• http://www.tansu.com.au/Services/ArchiePlex/ -- ArchiePlexForm ( http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/archieplex/archieplex.html )
• http://www.tansu.com.au/Services/News -- Newsgroups available onthe WWW

Unfortunately none of the URL-s above work anymore. According to this website, "Archie is a tool used to search FTP sites for particular software or filenames that will also search for keywords within filenames. Archie indexes millions of files from FTP sites worldwide".

35. Networked Resources on Art and Architecture

• http://www.uky.edu/Artsource/artsourcehome.html -- ArtSource ( http://www.ilpi.com/artsource/welcome.html )

ArtSource is an exquisite selection of all kinds of resources on art and architecture: exhibitions, image collections, museums, libraries, and many, many more.

36. The First Home

• http://www.voyagerco.com --VOYAGER Home Page ( http://voyager.learntech.com/cdrom/ )

Last, but not least, the website which used to be the incubator of Laurie Anderson's first home page and last interactive online experiment, the Green Room (slightly working within Teh Internet Archive, unfortunately). They also featured the Puppet Motel CD-ROM on their website (the page has been luckily preserved for posterity).

Just hit slash slash dotcom... - Part Two

Here is the second third of the URL list that was featured on the Nerve Bible Tour's T-shirt in 1995, preserved for posterity by Alan Lasky, updated by Mnemosyne in 2010.

13. Emerging Gigabits

• http://www-atp.llnl.gov/atp/telecom/html -- Telecommunications page ( http://www.llnl.gov/atp/ )

This is the archived start page of the Advanced Telecommunications Program (ATP).

14. Very Human...

• http://www.3w.com/3W/index.html -- The Internet with a Human Face

I had no luck with this URL, all I could find was a telling description of the website on links.net: "billing itself both as the Internet with Attitude and the Internet with a Human Face, this site is primarily promo pages for the print magazine. There is a brief synopsis of each of their issues, along with one article from each. Lots of info about ordering various things is available, however. The schitzophrenia of their Internet mission is reflected by their refusal to replicate their content online. Some people are still desparately clinging to copyright, or something, I guess."



15. Scientific Visualization Going Online

• http://www.ccsf.caltech.edu/ismap/image.html-- XMorphia

Hail to Teh Internet Archive: the website on the Morphogenesis from a Reaction-Diffusion System is available again, along with the links to images and videos that demonstrate the process of morphogenesis.



16. The World's Most Exciting Electronic Exposition

• http://www.cis.yale.edu/~donham/nadine/stuff.html -- EXPO ticketoffice ( http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/ticket_office.html )

The "World's most exciting electronic exposition" is still can be visited for free on the link provided by Alan Lasky. In fact it is an extensive information source on topics like the Vatican Library, hitherto highly secret internal documents from the Soviet Communist era, the conquest of America, the Dead See scrolls, paleontology and the palace of Diocletian at Split (Croatia).



17. Stories As You Like Them

• http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/gdr11/tree-fiction.html -- How to write "tree fiction"

 The Wayback Machine takes us back into 1994: an essay on "tree literature" by Gareth Rees. Not sure what "tree fiction" means? Perhaps this one will ring a bell: Wikipedia's entry on Gamebooks.



18. "The Truth IS out There!"

• http://www.clark.net/pub/jeffd/index.html -- The Right Side of the Web ( http://www.rtside.com/about.htm )

I managed to dig out the original website with the help of the Wayback Machine: Conservative Site of the Year 1996.



19. Oliver A. McBryan's Navigational Aid

• http://wwww.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html -- The World Wide Web Worm ( http://www.nic.ir/search/wwww.html )

Best Navigational Aid of the Year 1994, "serving 3,000,000 URL's to 2,000,000 folks/month".



20. CTR at CU

• http://www.ctr.columbia.edu/-- WWW Home Page at the CTR

Website for the Center for Telecommunications Research at Columbia University, as Teh Internet Archive preserved it from 1997.



21. Some Things Never Change

• http://www.cuhk.hk/ -- The Chinese University of Hong Kong Home Page

 Wow, the same URL is in use since 1995!



22. When Live Multimedia Was the Future of the Internet

• http://www.eit.com/techinfo/mbone/mbone.html -- MBONE Information Web ( http://info.cs.ust.hk/multicast/mbone.html )

"Short for Multicast Backbone on the Internet, MBone is an extension to the Internet to support IP multicasting -- two-way transmission of data between multiple sites." Mbone was an experiment starting in the early 1990s "to upgrade the Internet to handle live multimedia messages".



23. "A Rapidly Growing Company with Many Challenging Full-Time Positions Opening Every Week". Serious!

• http://www.eit.com/techinfo/mpeg/mpeg.html -- MPEG Technical Info

According to the archived original website from 1997, Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT) "develops and markets software products and services that enable e-commerce on the Internet". Their information page on MPEG is unfortunately no longer available, not even in teh Internet Archive.



24. Electric Press, RIP

• http://www.elpress.com/elpress/overview.html -- Overview of Electric Press, Inc. ( http://www.elpress.com/ )

 According to the Free Online Library, Electric Press, Inc. used to be "the premier provider of World Wide Web services" as of 1995. No further clues-- Alan Lasky's URL links to a Dutch company selling cleaning systems.


(one more post to go)

Just hit slash slash dotcom... - Part One

Hit return, hold down the option key, shift three times, slash, slash, dot com, blue blue sky. H-A-W-A-I-I dot com.
Standby.
One world, one operating system.
And there you are, in the middle of the blue Pacific.
Standby.
Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.

(As heard on the 'Songs and Stories from the Nerve Bible' video by Laurie Anderson)

I decided not to let Alan Lasky's priceless contribution to the Laurie Anderson / World Wide Web history vanish into oblivion. He is the guy who was committed (or crazy) enough to type in all the URL-s that he'd found on his Nerve Bible Tour memorabilia t-shirt, and updated the list around, hm, 2000-ish.

("So think of the potential."
Laurie Anderson, Nerve Bible Tour, Budapest, 1995)

When the original URL still works, it is a hyperlink. When I had to substitute a current URL, it appears in parenthesis after the name, and is a hyperlink. If nothing is linked,no current URL could be found.

(Alan Lasky on his website) 

Now it's time for another revisit of the URL-s, this time with a little help from Teh Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. What I contributed to the list is some actualized / dug-out-from-the-internet-archive URL-s (if necessary), plus some basic information on the websites' subjects (if I thought it would fit). I removed all direct links that are no longer working.

Since the list is epic, I'm going to divide it into three parts.

1. Louvre Museum

• http://mistral.enst.fr/~pioch/louvre/louvre.html -- LeWebLouvre ( http://www.louvre.fr/louvrea.htm )

The Louvre Museum's 'original' webpage cannot be found in the Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine though features a database / file list of the root of the website (mistral.enst.fr) from 1997 but without any index.html, which means the domain might not have been working anymore in 1997. Alan's contribution (the new Louvre URL) is working fine.



2. Brooder of Banner Ads

• http://nearnet.gnn.com/gnn/gnn.html -- Global Network Navigator Home Page
  http://nearnet.gnn.com/wic/newrescat.toc.html -- The Whole Internet Catalog

According to Wikipedia, "Global Network Navigator was the first commercial web publication and the first web site to offer clickable advertisements, now commonly referred to as "banner ads"." In 1996, gnn.com's archived index site did feature a Whole Internet Catalog (wow!) in its top menu, and it linked to the AOL website.



3. Putting the MOCK in Democracy

• http://pfm.het.brown.edu/people/mende/steps/index.html -- The Capitol Steps ( http://www.capsteps.com/ )

American political satire group The Capitol Steps was formed in the Reagan era and they are still working and active with more than 25 members. They update their website weekly with new material (see Alan's URL).



4. Mobile Manipulators and Integrated Bimanual Humanoids

• http://piglet.cs.umass.edu:4321/lpr.html-- The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics ( http://www-robotics.cs.umass.edu/lpr.html )

Here is what the Wayback Machine preserved of the original website. Not much change in design since 1997.



5. All Kinds of Cool Sh*t

• http://raptor.swarthmore.edu/jahall/ -- Justin's Links from the Underground ( http://www.links.net/vita/web/start/original.html )

Another piece of history: links to all kinds of Cool Sh*t on a personal website - from a period when one single website covered the whole, for example, beer scene on the Net.

6. All Aspects of Cinema and New Media

• http://remarque.berkeley.edu:8001/~xcohen/ -- CinemaSpace titlepage ( http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/ )

The domain is named after German antiwar writer Erich Maria Remarque, 'xcohen' is Alexander J. Cohen, the original URL links to his home page from 1996.



7. Collision in Outer Space

• http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/sl9/sl9.html-- Comet P-Shoemaker-Levy 9 Impact Home Page

The original website (as preserved by the Wayback Machine) documented the collision of a comet and the planet Jupiter in 1994 with lots of photos.



8. Virtual Observatory

• http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/skyview.html-- SkyView image retrieval facility

The Internet's Virtual Telescope ("Virtual Observatory on the Net generating images of any part of the sky at wavelengths in all regimes from Radio to Gamma-Ray") is fine and working as of 2010, actually it has recently endured a temporary breakdown due to heavy usage.

9. "We thought people would like it."

• http://www.stsci.edu//wfpc2-images.html -- Images from the WideField and Planetary Camera 2 ( http://archive.stsci.edu/gallery/index.html )

The WideField and Planetary Camera 2 was Hubble Telescope's main camera between 1993 and 2002, responsible for such famous Disney-like pictures like Embryonic Stars Emerge from Interstellar "Eggs" or The Ring Nebula (M57).



10. For Your Internet Music Needs

• http://sunsite.unc.edu/ianc/index.html -- Internet Underground Music Archive ( http://www.iuma.com/ )

Sadly, all that remained to posterity is this archived page by the Wayback Machine of "the Net's first, free hi-fi music archive" from Xmas 1996.

11. Experimenting with Video Processing Filters

• http://tns-www.lcs.mit.edu/cgi-bin/vs/vvdemo-- Video Processing with Live Sources ( http://www.tns.lcs.mit.edu/cgi-bin/vs/vvdemo )
• http://tns-www.lcs.mit.edu/vs/demos.html-- Text related to the above ( http://www.tns.lcs.mit.edu/vs/vvdemo/vvdemo.html )

The original website can be seen here (via Teh Internet Archive). Ironically, the page that the actual URL links to used to be hosting a copy of the US Tax Code for a while. The next two links in the list still have some additional info on the subject.

12. Web Robots 101

• http://web.nexor.co.uk/mak/doc/robots/robots.html -- World Wide Web Robots

Yay, Wayback Machine rules again! A vintage website for all things web robots, web wanderers, crawlers, spiders - whatever you call them.

(to be continued)