In Search For Old Internet Art

Brace yourselves, 'cuz this might be the biggest non-issue in the history of non-issues.

Quite some time ago, I picked up an interest with pre-2015 internet culture. I also happen to be an artist. As I browsed through sources of some of the webcomic images on This Very Wiki, and scrolled through some old threads on various websites in regards to bygone events, I have noticed that the overall mood, tone, and energy of a lot of artwork that I saw was made during these times was... quite different from modern internet fanart, to say the least. I'm even willing to say that you can pretty easily date an image on the internet by what it looks like, and what it contains. This led me to re-evaluate the value of what most people would consider "low art", and especially its history - that, much like in regards to high art, we can learn a lot from the history of how common internet art styles changed.

Unfortunately, there is No Backwards Compatibility in the Future, and sites try their darndest to make search for old content unreasonably hard. There are either no ways of sorting posts on most sites by date, or they existed but have been inexplicably removed. Say what you want about THE ABSOLUTE STATE OF Deviantart, I believe this is a good example of a place where I can find what I'm looking for, because of one simple reason - it was the top art platform of the timeframe I'm looking for. Unfortunately, it has been one of the main victims of this trend of removing sort-by-date option, among other things.

Nonetheless, much like art history studies the history of "high art", I believe "low art" also deserves to be studied from a historical perspective. I would like to know some ways of how to sift and recover old internet artwork from various platforms (some of which might even be defunct) for this very reason.

Am I out of my mind? Maybe. But hobbies are hobbies.

Edited by AoeAbility on Jun 8th 2023 at 11:29:48 AM

One resource that I might suggest is the Internet Archive (link)—not only the files that they store, but the "Wayback Machine", which archives webpages.

And indeed, a quick look suggest that they do indeed have snapshots of DeviantArt from 2005 and before (the main page, at least; I didn't check beyond that).

It's kind of a shame. I wish there was some 3rd party thing that could help me recover the posts themselves, and not just the front page.

Also before anyone says it, I know Image Booru exist and that they contain most of the functions I look for, but they have... other issues.

Perhaps, but that might run into some copyright issues—after all, the artists presumably didn't agree to have their work archived so.

Hmm... One thing that you can do, it seems, is to perform a Google search specific to a given site (such as DeviantArt), and restricted by date-range.

Not perfect, perhaps—for one thing this doesn't appear to work with an "Images" search—but it might be a starting point.

For example, take a look at this search: Long Google Search Link

Helpful. Might utilize it. Will report again if I need more help.