Content: – …. We’re discovering the intricacies of niche handmade websites alongside you.. The way you weave together early web vernacular, niche archives, platform subversions, and personal digital histories gives the reader a clear sense of how these collapses operate across different online environments. your text effectively highlights the affective dimension of digital encounters..how surprise, discomfort, and recognition shape the experience of online wandering. There’s a solid base for further linking these ideas to fashion, or at least acknowledging that the processes you talk about are present or obfuscated in online fashion (and why this might be the case), and ultimately formulating a set of takeaways for your own practice. Narrative: – Your narrative voice is engaging, curious, and grounded in personal reflection and forms itself as a nice (digi)geographical ’talk&walk through’ . You balance anecdotal discovery with broader contextual framing really nicely, and the almost stream of consciousness tone of voice allows the reader to follow the unfolding of your thought process while staying tied to concrete moments of ‘collapse’. The pacing works well: each example introduces a new facet of your concept and the autobiographical layer strengthens the emotional stakes. There’s room to tighten transitions between the latter sections towards the end of the essay, but overall the narrative maintains a clearly anchored in your embodied online experience. Form: – Think about ways in which you might be able to organise or curate a sense of collapse in the manner in which you present your final work/text. Draft for essay Online Fashion System One of my interests is 80s female bodybuilders. I like searching for archives of them, and because this can be considered a “niche” interest, the community around it is dedicated to its archive. People go to great lengths to collect, sort, and contextualize every photo, magazine scan, competition report, and training guide, along with all the paraphernalia that accompanies the sport. This shared devotion makes it a particularly rich corner of the internet to wander through. Most of these sites aren’t made for commercial purposes or to convince you to take up the sport; they simply want to show and share a world of hard, shiny muscle. Among the pages buried in my bookmarks, one website stands out: benchpresschampion.com. It may be one of the most exhaustive listing of bench press competitions across federations worldwide, documenting lifters’ records, body measurements, competition rules, historical notes, photographs, and, unexpectedly, instructions on how to design posters for events. The banner claims it has been updated for twenty-five years, which would place its creation around 2001, something its aesthetic immediately confirms. It follows the logic of an earlier web vernacular: bright colours, centered text, links underlined made to be clicked, grid arrangement and an email to contact the webmaster at the bottom of the page. While clicking through the sections, I opened the “humour” tab, guided by curiosity and the vague hope of a good laugh. The page displayed a grid of tiny cartoon thumbnails, that you need to click on to be able to view it enlarged in a new page, each paired with a short caption. One image in particular caught my attention: a hyper-muscular drawing of Rei Ayanami from Evangelion. The style was familiar; growing up online and watching anime in the 2010s meant encountering DeviantArt, a platform largely known for anime fanart and its entire gradient from safe to explicitly NSFW. Still, seeing that kind of image embedded in a bench press archive felt like an interesting choice. A few clicks later, something else shifted. Scrolling down the homepage, I realised I had missed a crucial detail: the founder of the site is Père Pascal Girard, self-described as “webmaster, champion and priest.” The combination truly unsettled me. First the amazement of discovering that the careful maintenance of this global, extremely detailed bench press archive was the work of a priest. Then the more disorienting recognition that this same priest had encountered, and decided to download and then upload, the hyper-muscular Rei Ayanami drawing I had just clicked on. At that moment, the contained world of the website started to crack. A collapse occurred, not dramatic, but enough to reframe how I perceived the entire archive, and how I understood my own position as its visitor. The aesthetic I explore in this essay is what I call World Collapsing. It describes the sensation, part intellectual and part physical, that goes through your mind and body when you realise that there is a real human being behind a website, someone with their own complexity, contradictions, and desires, and that this awareness changes your perception of the content you were looking at in the first place. At the same time, it reminds you that you too have a human body behind the screen, engaging with the digital space. This realisation often occurs when small cracks in the fourth wall of the interface are made visible, voluntarily or not. The screen does not shatter completely, but the ground beneath it feels unstable, ready to collapse at any moment. These cracks might take the form of an unusual navigation choice, an outdated layout, a humorous or strange image, or a personal trace left where it was not intended. The collapse is a tipping point: it does not destroy the site, but it reframes it, shedding new light on the objects of interest and creating a new perspective on its content. A world can only collapse if it has first been carefully built. The stability of the page, the apparent coherence of its layout, content, and tone and curation, is what makes the moment of rupture meaningful. Once you realize that the world is built, the shift is at once unsettling and captivating: a mix of surprise, mild discomfort, and curiosity. What once felt self-contained now becomes charged with meaning, revealing both the author behind the page and your own embodied presence as a viewer. In this sense, world collapsing is an aesthetic strategy that makes visible the otherwise hidden relationship between digital content, its maker, and its audience. This collapse can originate from many sources. Sometimes it is the direct discovery of the human behind the site, as with Père Pascal Girard. Sometimes it comes from the way a platform is used in a manner contrary to its intended purpose. And sometimes the collapse emerges as a tension, especially with content that is, or could become, object of fetishized aesthetics. As the geocity website 110 Sweater Girls for Your Pleasure once taught me, anything can be a fetish. A fetish, after all, is just looking at something from a perspective it was not designed for. World collapsing functions similarly: it occurs when the intended world of the page slips, and a new, stranger one suddenly becomes visible underneath. To understand the aesthetic strategy of _benchpresschampion.com_, it is important to situate it within the visual language and technical capacity of the early web. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, web design was shaped by technical limitations and amateur enthusiasm. HTML, the skeleton of the website, existed, in a far simpler and more rigid form than it does today; CSS, the styling of it was rudimentary, and much of what now appears as “design choices” on older websites were in fact the result of what the tools allowed or didn’t allow. Another thing that makes exploring websites from the earlier internet is either the compression of images, which means that you have to click on it in order to enlarge them, or that they are behind a link, and when clicking on it you can never be too sure of what image will appear. This also creates a certain tension that keeps you on your toes, and keeps you clicking and wandering. Many personal websites of that period, including _benchpresschampion.com_, were built not by "professionals" but by amateurs looking to share their world with others, as Olia Lialina’s put it, "To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links." Lots of these websites were made with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. These programs, such as Microsoft FrontPage (which the site’s footer identifies as its creation tool), allowed users to build pages visually, placing text, images, tables, and banners directly onto a canvas without writing code manually. This method produced a specific aesthetic: layouts structured by HTML tables, default system fonts, and a heavy reliance on bright colours, horizontal rules, and compressed saved images. The design was, in many ways, “vernacular,” to use the term, reflecting the hand and passion of the maker more than usability conventions. Websites built this way result in pages that today feel unfiltered or even intimate. This "handmade" quality is central to the world-building of sites: it constructs an enclosed universe of benchpress results, anecdotes, and humour, presented without irony. That also whats makes scrolling through archived geocities website so enjoyable for me, this feelings of earnest way to present oneself to the internet, through your personal life or hobbies World collapsing can also emerge when a platform is used in a manner contrary to its intended purpose. Another interest of mine, next to 80s female bodybuilder, is hanging around Google Maps. I enjoy wandering through places, rendered by satellites images and individual lense. My favorite things is to look at review left on historical or geographical landmarks. While looking at an old historical landmark, I noticed a few photos of a person posing in front of it: a man dressed in women’s clothing. Curious, I clicked on their profile and discovered a carefully curated collection of images showing them posing at various landmarks across the country, all posted on their Google Maps profile, accompanied with a biography that red something along the line "I am a crossdress, a man who enjoys wearing woman clothes, and I like taking photos. I am not a transgender." This, too, felt like a collapse in its own way. Suddenly, the platform I thought of as a tool for navigation, information and exploration became a space inhabited by someone’s personal, queer expression. The photographs, which initially seemed like standard location images, now carried the weight of someone's intentionality. It was a reminder that behind every image uploaded to the map, there's someone's life behind, and that someone might use a platform in ways that may never have been intended. The same feeling arose the first time I discovered some people were using Maarktplaats to look for friends and kinship. Part of the reason these moments and findings feel so compelling to me is that today the internet doesn't seem to offer the same abundance of personal corners it once did, at least with not the same sense of intimacy. When platforms for personal expression are heavily algorithmically controlled, finding traces of what I perceive as an intimate individual expression becomes rare. In this context, world collapsing can arise where someone bends a platform to make it their own, a personal, creative, or queer space, and the viewer glimpses that appropriation, that bending, and that body behind it. The collapse is both conceptual and affective: a shift in perspective that reveals human presence, play, and deviation within structures that normally feel stable to us. What functions as an aesthetic strategy in these moments is the familiarity of the platform and its clearly defined intended purpose. Platforms like Google Maps or Marktplaats carry strong assumptions about how they are meant to be used: Maps for navigation and exploring locations, Marktplaats for buying and selling items. When someone bends these uses to fit their own personal need the tension between the platform’s intended function and the user’s intervention produces a perceptual crack. The viewer experiences the collapse precisely because they already know what the platform should be doing; the deviation is visible and meaningful against that intended purpose. These acts reveal the underlying human presence in systems that are designed to feel impersonal, informational or transactional. What makes these moments striking is the connection between the digital and the real world. The platform mediates interactions, but the traces left behind, reviews, photos, or profiles, carry tangible, lived experience. The collapse occurs when the viewer recognises this link: the digital interface is no longer just a tool; it is also a space where people enact, perform, and document their lives. The familiar, functional structure of the platform amplifies a surprise, making the human intervention visible and meaningful. What makes this aesthetic of World Collapsing striking for me is the exchange and transfer between the "digital" and the "real" world. I grew up on the internet in the 2010s. In primary school, I was taught that blue links were meant to be clicked, how to conduct proper research on Google, and how to send a well worded email. By my teenage years, I was online watching anime for hours, chatting with friends I met online on Skype, and playing Minecraft. Being curious, queer, and drawn to niche interests meant that I occasionally ventured further into spaces like DeviantArt and other corners of internet lore that were considered inappropriate or best kept hidden. For me, the internet was a deeply personal space, one carefully separated from my real-life self. Through researching for this essay, I realized that this separation between the digital and the “IRL” self was very significant to me, and did not anticipate at first that this essay would connect to something so personal. When people, content, or interactions breached that boundary, it created a distinct sensation, a mixture of physical and emotional discomfort, that I now recognize as a collapse; a subtle, unsettling intersection between the real and digital worlds, and the virtual connection of the bodies behind the screens. The work of Jon Rafman exemplifies the concept of world collapsing. By bringing the often grotesque and private imagery of 4chan and internet lore into the museum context, he exposes the hidden lives behind screens, breaking the assumed separation between digital and public spaces, and that's probably why I was drawn so much to his work, before reading about alleged accustion of predatory behavior and sexual abuse. Likewise, the work of Meriem Bennani uses 3D character animation to tell semi-autobiographical stories in a documentary style, collapsing the boundary between personal experience and digital representation. LINK TO FASHION? MORE SOURCE+THEORY !! LINK TO MY PRACTICE? The subversion of platforms and world building are a part of my practice and ways of doing research. Just like searching for crossdressers on Google Maps might not be the intended use of the platform, or looking for lesbian archives on auction sites and Marktplaats could be considered as a bend. Yet these deviations show hidden human presences and alternative uses, which is precisely where the aesthetic of world collapsing emerges. The desire to collect and archive these traces is also a way of building my own world, a queer world where histories are often hidden, erased, or fragmented. In this space, imagination and speculation allow me to fill the gaps, creating connections and narratives.
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