The degenerative web page:
A story "told" by multiple voices.
2005. Eugenio Tisselli.

We are not here to create. We are here to destroy.

On march 13, 2005, an experiment involving digital death was launched: the degenerative web page. The experiment was announced in the following way:

"a web page that slowly becomes corrupted. each time the page is visited, one of its characters is either destroyed or replaced."

"every time someone visits this page, one of the characters that make up the html code gets either deleted or replaced. this causes a step-by-step degeneration, not only of the page's content, but also of its structure."

Originally, the degenerative web page was formed by text, html tags and PHP code. It was precisely this code that constituted the degeneration engine, which was set in motion every time the web page was requested via HTTP. The code was executed, causing the deletion (or replacement) of a randomly-chosen character from the page's body. The page was then re-saved, making the changes permanent. Afterwards, the page was shown in the browser of the requesting user, who could immediately see the destructive consequence of his/her request.

Some questions were asked in the original text of the degenerative web page:

"repeated viewing can kill? are our eyes predators of their targets?"

"does everything contain the seed of its own destruction?"

"is visual culture a ritual of cannibalism and rebirth?"

Also, a seemingly trivial pair of statements were included:

"the only hope for this page to survive is that nobody visits it. but then, if nobody does, it won't even exist."

The degenerative web page was announced to the eu-gene discussion list, associated to the generative.net web site. It was also included in the runme.org software art repository.
The announcement of the page caused immediate reactions, and the users literally stormed it, causing severe damage in as little as a few hours later. A historical record was made, so the page's degeneration through time can now be appreciated.

By day one, the page was already illegible.

On day two, all the html tags were corrupted.

On day four, the page was totally unrecognizable.

A few days after that, the following question was introduced in the degenerative web page's introduction:

"after just a few days, the degenerative page is literally fading away. it is totally unreadable, and things will just get worse. should digital euthanasia be applied in this case?"

This question raised some reactions, which will be shown later in this text.

The page kept fading away and finally, after almost four months of agony, the degenerative web page disappeared. Now, when it is visited, a single character appears sometimes at the top left corner. I consider this character to be the web page's ghost.

I think about the degenerative web page as a process-driven narration. What was told here was a story about destruction and death: action and consequence. It was a story with a beginning and an ending. It had a passive character: the page itself, and an active one: the user / visitor / reader, whose actions, along with the code embedded in the page, shaped the story through time. So, the web page was programmed for self-destruction, but only through the process of visiting / reading.

Many were inspired by the metaphor implicit in this process-story (could it be called "digital-age fairy tale"?) and wrote about it. I consider this to be the richest fruit of this digital-death experience.

Vito Campanelli wrote for neural.it:
... "degenerative" suggests a reflection on the unstable nature of code. The project consists of a simple web pag in which one of the characters that form the HTML code is deleted or substituted with each visit. This leads to a progressive and unstoppable degeneration of the page's content and, in a more general way, of it's structure. Tisselli's proposal, which calls to mind other experiments on degenerative art, can be interpreted as an admonishment regarding the perishability of web pages, whose survival is in fact linked to code, and thus to an extremely unstable element within which the slightest variation, such as an unclosed tag, can lead to the collapse of the whole structure and the upsetting of meaning itself. "Degenerative" definitely reminds us that the Internet is a giant with clay feet, and that behind the surface of which we see lies nothing more than an aggregation of insructions, the integrity and homogeneity of which we cannot renounce to.

Raquel Herrera wrote in her blog, Tempus Fugit:
...the piece [degenerative] acts as a bridge towards comprehending the process of social consumption in contemporary art. It seems that in some cases digital art is more capable of analyzing the schizophrenic discourse of contemporary art than the museum's and gallery's own physical art...
The entry was commented by an anonymous user:
It is really interesting to see this experiment as a reflection on communication (in my opinion, it trascends the fields of aesthetics and art). Producing content for Internet can be cheap or tremendously expensive, but the value of what exitsts there is different from what exists in the world of atoms, even if I don't believe the Internet is a sort of alternative reality. The great majority of information on the net stays hidden, and curiously, a lot of this "frozen" information is of great value... for those who are able to find it. The great mystery: Where does the value of Internet's contents lie?

After the question whether digital euthanasia should be applied or not, Ben Davis wrote a short text which spread through the net via rhizome.org:

Right (click) to die.
'Should digital euthanasia be applied in this case?' asks the gateway page of Eugenio Tisselli's recently-launched 'degenerative' project. Not afraid to push a hot button issue into new territory, the artist is here refering to the mindless text-noise yielded by the logic that he has built into his project: the 'degenerative' page--a field of text featuring such questions as, 'is visual culture a ritual of cannibalism and rebirth?' and 'does everything contain the seed of its own destruction?'--is programmed to atrophy by one character each time a visitor views it. The site offers the option of seeing the current state of the
project or reviewing a log that charts the decay yielded by traffic to the site on each day subsequent to its launch. Already, the process has progressed to the point where the excitement is essentially past. Finally, whereas the state of ambiguous mental stasis that makes 'non-digital' euthanasia cases so agonizing provokes hard, human questions, the swift and predictable logic of 'degenerative' seems more to allegorize how digital efficiency saps such questions of their gravity.

It should be said that this was written while the heavily-mediatized story about the (legal) struggle between Terri Schiavo's natural death versus the disconnection from her artificially-sustained life was raging on the worldwide news stage.

Finally, Marius Serra wrote an article in the spanish newspaper "La Vanguardia". Here is a quote:
... Tisselli, being conscious that sense lies in the process, publishes images of the increasingly degenerated page. In its apparent simplicity, his proposal is a powerful metaphor of our devastating existence in this world. Nobody will convince us to stop seeing, even if this causes great disaster. Are we doomed to be nothing more than tourists or tv spectators? ...

As a conclusion, a further experiment was launched. It was called "regenerative", pretending to be a misleadingly optimistic follow-up to "degenerative". In the "regenerative" web page, text degenerates with each visit, but it also attempts to regenerate itself by trying to extract some text from the refering page. If extraction succeeds, the new text is implanted within the degenerating text and becomes part of it. So, this new process-story relies on linking: it will go on as long as people create links to it from other pages. The content of the regenerative web page has now become an enormous, shapeless expanse of text, thanks to all the visitors who have arrived to it following a hypertext link. This time, the repeated execution of code leads to a disease that, like cancer, triggers the uncontrolled growth of text-tissue tumors. There is no limit to this growth and, before the sun destroys the earth, the sick textures on this page will be bigger than the whole Internet.