I recently went to Bring Your Own Website, an event hosted by Anne Lee Steele as part of Connection Established: Digital Folklore and Web Craft at The Photographers’ Gallery.

I enjoyed visiting the Connection Established exhibition back in March with Annet Dekker, a researcher and curator at the University of Amsterdam, who has a longstanding expertise in new media art, its curation and its conservation. It was great to be able to browse the exhibition and talk with Annet about situating what was shown in the exhibition in relation to longer histories of the web, net art and digital culture.

Connection Established is curated by artist, writer and researcher Kendal Beynon together with artist and curator Sam Mercer who produces the Digital Programme at The Photographers’ Gallery. It draws on Kendal’s research on digital folklore and DIY internet communities with London South Bank University.

The exhibition explores the resurgence of interest in DIY internet aesthetics and zine making against a backdrop of the rise of AI and social media platforms, as well as their associated social and environmental costs - from data centre pollution to political polarisation to privacy concerns.

It was accompanied by Ghost in the Loop, an accompanying online exhibition with 6 experimental artworks exploring content that is “no longer made specifically for human audiences”, including pieces from Celune Acheampong, Linden Derichs, Mariana Marangoni, Martyna Marciniak, Shaheer Tarar and Valia Lolidou.

Kendal and v buckenham created an interactive quiz where visitors could select options and get a printed receipt inviting them to explore a DIY web culture or practice relevant for them - such as permacomputing, zine-making, web crafting, wiki pages, personal homepages and feminist servers. This was accompanied by an invitation to share online spaces and memories and add these to a wall.

On one wall there were screenshots from many groups, people and projects related to the exhibition’s themes - such as aesthetics wiki, Alt Text as Poetry, everest pipkin, varia.zone, cristina cochior, slashdiv, tendernet’s Imagining Feminist Interfaces and many more.

Another wall displayed artefacts such as a piratebox on a Raspberry Pi with a digital zine library, a screen with the downpour app for making games, and copies of merritt k’s LAN Party book and the Internet Phone Book.

A few weeks later, I went along to Bring Your Own Website with Liliana and Joana. In keeping with the exhibition’s ethos, this gathered artists, writers, technologists and others to share their DIY websites and web crafting practices.

The event was hosted by Anne Lee Steele, who drew on the spirit and structure of the Internet Phone Book to gather these websites and practices. By this time, the exhibition wall had filled up with many receipts with online spaces and memories.

Anne started by introducing herself, her projects and her practices through her website. She shared her recent html review piece on walking to Baekdusan, her internet walking tours, her research on open ecosystems, her interactive installation elegies for oil spills as well as her longer term work on poetic tactics to counter extraction.

She went onto introduce Internet Phone Book - “an annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web”, co-edited by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost. She spoke about this in relation to the history of phonebooks and the development of the web.

Then we moved into a sharing session. This combined websites shared by participants with sites selected using the Internet Phone Book’s “Dial-a-site” page, with numbers suggested by participants. Sam Mercer made a desktop spread of websites that participants had created.

This included sharing of websites from:

• the London Permacomputing Club and its activities - presented by Ana, Isobel and friends
• Alix Wiesser - including her text-based game The Cottage
• Y is greater than X from Célune Gabriella Ama Acheampong - a website which shows “man” if the window is larger than 640 pixels, and “woman” if less than 640 pixels
• the School of Commons - and a bit about its history, projects and activities
• plasticdino and kitty’s artistic practice
• Abdelkawy Abdou including the mosaic.aa game and an interactive website to explore cultural locations in London
• an online zine maker to make it easy to lay out 8 images into a printable zine (which also reminded me of the Electric Zine Maker and other resources we have been gathering as part of “zine-making as method”)
• Beneath Our Footsteps - an interactive, collaborative artwork from compiler.zone

I presented this website, including about its design, cookies and carbon, as well as various artistic practices and experiments - such as data not found, everything in the forest park, forestscapes, vclip, wilding and buffering.

The event closed with a disco from Sam Mercer and then we all went to a place nearby to chat and catch up. 🌕

Some further links

• Acheampong, C. & Derichs, L. & Marangoni, M. & Marciniak, M. & Tarar, S. & Lolidou, V. (2026) ‘Ghost in the Loop’, The Photographers’ Gallery: Unthinking Photography.
• Beynon, K. (2023). Virtual Gardens: Cultivating Care through Reclaimed Digital Environments.
• Beynon, K. (2024). Zines And Computational Publishing Practices: A Countercultural Primer. A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 13(1), 23–36.
• Connection Established - online guide with interviews and reading list
• Tjalve, K. and Cost, E. (2025) The Internet Phone Book.