Hello! Welcome to my silly little art project. I am a writer from Kentucky and I created this website for an in-class workshop for experimental and cross-genre writing. If you are one of my classmates and we are workshopping this as we speak, I apologize for the clutter and general disarray of everything. While some of it is stylistic a lot of it was from my lack of knowlodge when it comes to coding in HTML (I learned HTML and CSS in a week for this, yikes). Becuase of how weird this thing is I thought I should probably write an explanation/ artists statement on what I was trying to accomplish. I must admit that is project is a bit vunerable to me. So much of this feels like its things that only I think about or find interesting and I'm a little worried about it being too obtuse (there is my fear for the workshop Kelly).
This website was made in homage to old geocities websites. For those who don't know, before Amazon and Google owned everything (circe 1999-2009) geocities was a popular and easy way for everyday people to make websites. After 2009 the service was discontinued but you can still find a bunch through Internet Archive (which is unfortunately down at the minute do to a major DDOS attack:( ). Me and friends comb through these databases from time to time in what we call "geocities sleuthing," and I save any interesting or odd ones we find in case we want to ever look back at them later. Geocities has a vibe, a pungent vibe at that. You may have noticed this vibe upon enter widestepper-society.com. Loud colors, big repeating graphics, ridiculous skull gifs that I love with all my heart. Opening a geocities website can feel like viewing someones private journal or personal memories. You never feel like your supposed to be there, like you just fell into it. The best geocities websites can leave you utterly confused as to the motive or morals behind the person who made it. I tried to capture many of the geocities je ne sais quoi, from the completely unfiltered way people talked back then to its guest book (if you haven't clicked on it yet, it doesn't actually work, like I said, a week to learn HTML), the absolute hatred for "the man" and "posers," and how no matter what, every website had a section for poetry.
The subject was the hardest thing to come up with for this project. I wanted something to bring about that state of hysterical confusion that me and my friends love so much. Lately I have been watching a lot of videos on graffiti writers and the fascinating eccentricities of their subculture. I found it so interesting how they practiced their art in spite of its illegality, and this thrill was partly why they did it. I began to wonder at that idea, and ended up writing a poem about it. Within I wrote the line: antisocial widestepper. And as I began teaching myself HTML in preperation for this project that word came back to me, widestepper. What makes a person a widestepper? What could be the definition for that term if applied to a sub-culture of its own?
Widestepper(noun)-[1] A Jaywalker; [2] Someone who, either through angst or apathy of the modern world and its rules and systems, decides to knowingly break its rules for no other reason than to disobey them.
To be a widestepper is to intentionally disregard a rule for no other reason than to break it. Jaywalking of course has good reason to be illegal. But obeying crosswalks feels so contricting at points. I'm sure everyone has had the thought, "why should I walk all the way down the block to a crosswalk when where I need to go is right across the street." We are autonomous beings, we can go where we please. A widestepper is fed up with the feeling that they lack autonomy due to the rules that surround them and are completely apathetic towards the harm disobeying these rules might cause them. Widesteppers has decided that to be a pedestrian is to live under a boot.
I recorded myself jaywalking a number of times for this project. At this time the cumulative views on Youtube is 1.2k, which is a little nerve racking but its also youtube shorts so I don't think many people payed very close attention to it. If you are someone who is mad at me for technically breaking a law and want to seek legal recourse, (A) I did it in a well-lit safe environment mostly at night where their was little to no cars coming in either lane, (B) As I said in the disclaimer of the Youtube shorts, the govornor of Kentucky is a friend of a friend, do with that what you will, (C) I would be very sad if I face any consequences I'm just I writer man I don't want to go to jail for jaywalking. (I can also delist the vidoes on request I honestly don't care that much about it).
The videos that accompany this project on the "honorary widestepper" page are a collection of a rather silly Youtube videos that I love quite dearly. They capture the absolute beauty and chaos of the internet that make it a place so uniquely human. I love how weird the internet is because it shows how weird we can be if we are given the chance to make whatever we want. Art to me is a youtube video with 12 views that shows some guy review a book he really likes. I'll never meet that man but I know what he think about Narnia, there is beauty in that. I think I love geocities and weird youtube videos for the same reason I love going to antique stores and buying strange paintings; we as humans make so much stuff, and so much of it will be forgotten, and all of it is wonderful.
Special thanks to all of the people that helped get this thing done: my two computer sciences buddies, whom I will affectionately designate as "Boss Hog" and "The Killer," who stood over my shoulder and watched as I forgot the "/" in the endtag for the thousandth time; and of course to my lovely partner, who helped me workshop ideas even if they were bad.