Hell.com

» see hell.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

hell.com sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. i was on a 33.6k modem in ankara reading about it in printed dergi articles years later. the site was live between august 1995 and november 2009, and the whole point of it was that you could not just visit.

kenneth aronson registered hell.com in august 1995 and told the new york times in 1998 that it was 'a vast creative project' involving roughly fifty new media artists from twenty countries. the front page carried a disclaimer that you were not authorized to be there and an invitation to join a waiting list of eighteen to twenty-two months. this might have been real. it might have been performance. sources treat it as both.

i was fourteen in ankara on a dial-up connection when hell.com's first big exhibition ran in january 1999. net art was not a scene i knew about. the whole net.art movement reached me later, mostly through university library books and the occasional print piece. hell.com by then was already a locked door with a rumor behind it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the exhibitions came in four waves. 'surface' ran from 1 to 26 january 1999. 'skinonskinonskin' arrived that september. 'chaos' opened in november 2000. 'gateway' ran from 2002 through 2006 as an experimental chat platform. the front-facing site was sparse and hostile. black backgrounds under cryptic javascript with no obvious navigation. underneath there was a members-only tier with the actual work.

aronson also ran a 'soul redemption' donation ladder. ten to ten thousand dollars in the early years, later scaled down to twenty to two thousand. this was part fundraising and part performance, mostly the second. the money that came in went into keeping the exhibitions live and paying the twenty-country roster of contributing artists.

~ what got buried with it ~

in 1999 the italian net.art collective 0100101110101101.org spent the first 48 hours of hell.com's public window scraping the entire site and republishing it as anticopyright commentary. aronson called this simple theft. the collective called it democratizing an elite gate. this is a fairly standard argument shape for the net.art era. hell.com stayed gated regardless.

the deeper thing buried with hell.com is the idea that a website could be a serious art object at all. the site was tuned to a specific 1995 to 2002 window when the browser was still a strange new frame and rendering conditions varied enough that a page could be an artwork in the way a magazine spread could not. by the time hell.com actually closed, the browser had become a solved surface with a standardized frame. there was no more strangeness to work against.

~ the domain afterlife ~

aronson tried to sell hell.com in april 2000 with an eight million dollar reserve. the auction was withdrawn. moniker ran a second auction on 27 october 2006 with a one million dollar reserve. that one did not close either. rick latona finally bought the domain in november 2009, and the actual hell.com project ended with that sale. latona later reauctioned it with reserves up to one and a half million dollars. as of 2023 hell.com redirects to mybible.com, a christian scripture site, which is the kind of ending only the internet could arrange.

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