Free art piece idea #15

This one is called “Federating the dark matter of the web”

404 pages are where you land when there is no place to land on a given web domain. Most of the time, you get a boring 404 page but more and more, if you hang in the interesting corners of the web, you get to see some creative 404 pages. If each web page on a web domain is a leaflet then the web domain is the large folder containing all these leaflets. The 404 page is the leaflet you get every time you ask for a leaflet that doesn’t exist in the folder.

One example of a creative 404 page

This art piece is one that reimagines the destination of all 404 pages. It aims to create a single place where all the nonsensical web paths and journeys would lead. A digital black hole. Now, this makes close to zero commercial sense for online companies as they want people to go back to their main websites.

But say this “single destination” serves charity and global good. Say it works one day a year! What if all 404 pages were donation pages for a worthy cause every 5th of January! That would be great for the charity.

However, this art piece doesn’t aim to aid any charity. The goal is to turn all 404 pages into doors into a story that exists in the dark matter of the web. In other terms, this is a story whose chapters exist on different websites’ 404 pages.

An example of a website’s 404 page once this art piece is deployed

The author of this idea is to write the story and use a mix of business acumen and incentives for designers and front-end developers to help turn their companies’ 404 pages into doors leading to chapters of her story. Good luck.