This website was made as a gallery and context for the great filter images I created as a series. I made an art exhibition focusing on the concept of the great filter which is a speculated answer to the Fermi paradox. The subject matter was conjunctive to the wild world of the early internet around 1995. I wanted to create a nostalgic experience for the viewers as they learned about this terrifying and quite literally other-worldly subject matter.

The images for the website were produced in the program Blender. I taught myself how to uv-texture (pretty roughly) a model that I made for this project in the work Nuclear War.

In the work Abiogenesis, I researched what kind of molecules would be present in the primordial ocean of the early Earth and then made scientifically accurate models of them with the website MolView and cleaned them up in OpenBabel. I expanded my knowledge of not just Blender, but the universe with this project.

The Blender images were then taken into Photoshop 5.0 which I installed on a Windows 95 virtual machine, where I sized and dithered them. I made the website on the virtual machine as well as on the program Microsoft FrontPage 98. I exported these files onto my laptop and then edited the HTML and CSS to be compatible with mobile devices, and then uploaded them onto my website.

I installed my exhibition on April 20, 2024, at the Mazmanian Art Gallery on the Framingham State University Campus. Since the website was the medium, I mounted a TV on the wall and set up a small computer so that it could only show my website. I used kiosk mode and put my website on the computer locally so that loading would not be an issue. The computer was very underpowered so this was a real concern. I printed the images on my HP 8030 at home to ensure a lo-fi and fitting treatment. They were stuck to the wall with tape.

The reception was on April 23. The show was well enjoyed by all the visitors and I even got interviewed by the school newspaper; although, I was very nervous as I'm not the biggest fan of attention like that. I enjoyed having my art seen by many people. There were mixed reactions as I suspected as the work was made for a very specific target audience and embodied a certain period that if uninitiated with, would probably seem pretty weird. I enjoyed seeing my peers work up in the gallery as well. That was a big highlight of the experience!