What The Homepage Gallery is

The Homepage Gallery is an exhibition, not a homepage. Between 2001 and 2007 this domain carried "SHIHO'S HOUSE," a personal site kept by one person in Japan: a journal that reset each month, galleries of illustrated aphorisms, a bulletin board, a flea market page, shelves about beer and bookstores, and a small population of cats drawn as GIFs. What survives of it lives in the public capture record.

Why a gallery

A personal homepage of that era was a house you built with your own markup. The metaphor here is literal: each practice of that house, the journal, the themed shelves, the guest book, is treated as a piece taken down from its original wall and hung again in a white room, with a label that says what the record shows and what it cannot.

What the labels say

Every piece carries three lines: what the site presented, what the archive kept, and what is not shown. The third line is the honest one. Captures keep the frame of a page more often than its furniture; where the record is silent, the label says so rather than restoring furniture from imagination.

What this site is not

This is not the original homepage, and it is not written by its maker. It does not reproduce the journal's entries, does not re-host the aphorism images, and does not pretend the house still stands. It is one reader's hanging of what the public record kept, dated and labeled.

The line that governs

What the archive kept is the frame of the house; the furniture inside is what this gallery tries to hang again.