Living Digital Archives began as an inquiry into the limits of physical curation and how exhibition practices might be reimagined in digital space. The project examines the mortality of online environments and the aesthetics of disappearance, reframing the exhibition as a generative index rather than a static display of artifacts.

In dialogue with One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2013) by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, an archival project reconstructing lost GeoCities homepages from data rescued by the volunteer collective Archive Team during GeoCities’ 2009 shutdown, Living Digital Archives extends this methodology into a continuously evolving digital exhibition. Drawing from the artists’ automated Tumblr, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op, which generates reconstructed pages every twenty minutes, the project reimagines the archive as a spatial environment that invites continual rediscovery.

By situating relics of early web culture within a spatial interface, the work collapses the distance between the web’s origins and its imagined futures. Visitors navigate constellations of recovered pages or enter their own Tumblr blogs, transforming personal media into a generative landscape that turns the act of curation into personal experience.

In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym distinguishes between two modes of nostalgia: restorative, which seeks to reconstruct the past, and reflective, which acklowledges the past cannot be recreated and uses its melancholy to find meaning in the present. As interpreted by Amy de la Haye and Judith Clark in One Object: Multiple Interpretations (2008), this reflective stance offers a curatorial strategy for engaging the past through the lens of the present. Living Digital Archives adopts this reflective mode, allowing users to encounter the early internet not as a fixed artifact but as a generative space that recontextualizes past media within the conditions of the present.