Of little databases and the poetics of the web revival
Faculty First Person I Danny Snelson
Danny Snelson is a UCLA assistant professor of English and design media arts. His research and teaching blend a study of poetry and poetics with work on digital and network cultures, material text studies and media theory. His latest book, “The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats,” will be published June 24 by the University of Minnesota Press. Learn more about his work at his website.
This quarter, I taught a new creative writing seminar called “Web Writing Workshop,” or WWW for short. My students are creating glitchy pixel art, pop-up ads, culture-jamming sites, fan fic stories and GIF-laden horoscopes — among a wide array of creative works that might seem more at home in the 1990s than the 2020s.
Despite the anachronism of their aesthetics, I remain astounded by how urgently these works speak to the challenges of the present.
Their creations offer a glimpse of an internet that might have developed differently, and an idea of how we might still envision alternatives to the present. The poetic forms they employ hail from 30 years ago: splash pages, marquee animations, custom cursors and a density of ridiculous GIFs set upon glittering backgrounds, to name but a few markers of this trend.
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Photo caption: In courses like “Algo-Lit: A Critical Introduction to AI Literature” and “Web Writing Workshop,” Danny Snelson (standing) and his students develop creative and experimental approaches to generative AI and internet culture.
Photo credit: Stephanie Yantz for UCLA Humanities