More wonderfully deadpan quasi-Earth Art [Internet Archive] from Houston's Art Guys. An ordinary median strip is designated as a "natural area," with documentation photos of flora (patches of dead grass), fauna (bird feathers), artifacts (discarded candy wrappers), and "wayfinding" (spraypainted utility markings).
A previous Situation Sculpture was The Flying Stump (no longer flying).
Paul Slocum compiled an internet surf club history, where he explains the "clubs" as the product of a particular technological moment, specifically, the use of PHP and MYSQL in the late '90s/early '00s to make dynamic websites, a practiced that flourished in the mid-'00s. His listing of the main group blogs employing these techniques for "art," including sites that preceded and followed them (for context), is thorough, if lacking in value judgments. All these sites can't be good, in fact many of them weren't.
Slocum's original, clean HTML design for the history can be found on this archive page at Rhizome.org.
Rhizome posted the history on its blog, where it added a second side scroll, made navigation more awkward, and kiboshed the "retro" effect of the HTML page. Their blog, you may recall, is the result of a recent redesign by Coca Cola's ad agency, which added zany upside down fonts and rendered past content on the site invisible. The blog is also now published separately from the Rhizome front page, for some reason.
There was back channel discussion of the possibility that Slocum's survey would coincide with the "official" archiving of the surf club Nasty Nets. Rhizome saved all the posts from that site and published them on their back pages but never finished the conservation. Curiously, the far more art-world-friendly (some might say conservative) site Vvork was lovingly preserved for future generations (or until the next site redesign).
