Recreating a lost website: the Prambanan project revisited or Still in defence of dance as an archaeological issue
View of the Prambanan complex, October 2000
Websites do not last forever, they are as perishable as any other artefact. Our team discovered this when the website hosted by the National University of Singapore (NUS), set up in connection with the project Dance and the Temple: interpretation and construction of heritage through a virtual site (henceforth ‘Dance and the temple’), was taken down in early 2008 and was lost in cyberspace. We were somewhat shocked, as we had not so secretly been hoping that our website would last forever. However, soon after the initial dismay, the archaeologist in all of us team members kicked in and we decided to recreate the site. Create anew, not reconstruct. We knew it would have to be a different website – to begin with it would be based on wikis and it would be part of the Stanford Humanities Lab portfolio of projects, rather than following the earlier model.
But I am getting ahead of myself here. Let’s have some background. ‘Dance and the temple’ was a project funded by the Getty Research Program from 2000 to 2002, with a generous collaborative grant. Briefly, this was a collaboration between a group academics interested in Javanese art, archaeology, and dance, based at the National University of Singapore, the University of Oxford and the University of Indonesia, and a few other people involved in computer animation, working in London.
The project was, at the time, rather innovative: the idea was to explore the temple site of Prambanan, a 9th century CE complex near the city of Yogyakarta, in Central Java, from an archaeological, art historical, architectural and dance perspective and create a website which would allow a virtual exploration of the site from all these standpoints, simultaneously, relying on computer animation, QuickTime VR and all such new technologies – we are talking about eight to nine years ago, almost centuries in relation to the very fast pace at which technology develops!
The website was duly set up by CASA, NUS, with much fanfare, but then, you know how things go…The whole team disbanded in 2002, soon after the project was completed, no one was there to update the website and eventually NUS took the drastic decision, based on pragmatic considerations, to take it down – what was the point of having an out-of-date website, badly in need of looking after, something no one seemed to be in a position to do, as there were logistic problems?
Now that our project is enjoying a new lease of life on the Metamedia Lab server, some of us former team members have come together again intending to keep the new website going for as long as possible – the use of wikis makes it a much simpler process and it does not matter where all of us are physically located, which was the hurdle in connection with the NUS website.
Scene from Sendratari Ramayana, Prambanan, October 2000