https://19-1-22-5-4.neocities.org/
Raquel Luaces & Oriol Diaz, 2025
.sav, produced in 2025, is conceived as a contemporary reinterpretation of early memorial and tribute websites from the late 90s and early 2000s, revisited through current online behaviors surrounding death, grief, mental health, and nostalgia. The project establishes parallels with early digital memorialization platforms such as muchloved.com or rememori.com, which offered collective spaces for grieving and remembrance and which today appear, at least to younger generations, obsolete. Drawing on these references, the work reorganizes such practices, proposing an updated form of the tribute website that reflects how collective memory and vulnerability currently circulate online through anonymity. Through brief phrases and longer reflections, online voices generate a diffuse yet recognizable sense of accompaniment and emotional resonance.
The project is based on a real archive of comments that emerged around so-called Internet Checkpoint videos uploaded to YouTube by the user taia777. The notion of the Internet Checkpoint appears within online communities to describe videos that function as symbolic stopping points within the continuous flow of the web. Often encountered by chance through recommendation systems, these videos become spaces where users pause momentarily and leave a minimal trace of their passage: a comment about how life is going, a reflection, or a confession, before moving on. Frequently described as a kind of “end of the internet”, these spaces operate similarly to a global guestbook, in which individual experiences accumulate without direct interaction, forming an archive of shared affect. These comments, written between 2012 and 2021, were collected by another user, rebane2001, and later shared on Reddit, resulting in an extensive record of intimate expressions deposited anonymously in a public digital environment while producing a sense of community. From this archive, containing more than 20000 comments, around 3000 were extracted for .sav, filtering for those that reflect topics of mental health, grief, and also hope for continuing to live.
Although this phenomenon often goes unnoticed, sociologist and researcher Richy Srirachanikorn proposed in 2025 the concept of the Internet Pitstops as a way of understanding these YouTube videos as places where people collectively stop, revisit older content, and momentarily align through shared memories and digital nostalgia. There is also an artistic work by Ruby Thelot from 2023, A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints, that engages with this issue, in which the artist printed ninety-nine checkpoints as a way of translating the digital into a physical archive, implicitly responding to the power held by large platforms and their capacity to remove content at will.
Hosted on the website of the Institute of Network Cultures, the work acquires an additional layer of meaning. At a moment when the INC itself is transitioning from a physical presence to an entirely online activity, questions of digital memory, continuity, and disappearance become a reality in the very context in which the piece is presented. In this way, the work does not only position itself as an archive of the past, but as an active reflection on how the web languages of tribute and memory can be rethought within contemporary digital culture.
