Documentation

Before making Stellababe99, I was drawn to abandoned fan-sites, old fan-videos on YouTube, and had a growing obsession with Britney Spears. So when the opportunity arose to create an online public art piece, I had clear vision: a fictional blog about a fictional character who existed in the time period I was fascinated by. The twist? Her website had been hacked.

As a Tumblr user in the early 2010s, I had some coding experience, which motivated me to build the project from scratch. However, finding a starting point proved challenging. To overcome this, I turned to the program Twine, an open-source tool designed for constructing interactive and hypertext fiction, which provided a strong foundation. I also used resources from W3Schools to refine the aesthetic, ensuring it captured the nostalgia I wanted to convey.

Working on this project was a thrilling experience, allowing me to immerse myself in a fictionalized 2007. I’ve long been fascinated by the combination of storytelling and world-building through the internet, and this project gave me the chance to explore that while reflecting on popular culture of the early 2000s.

To tie everything together, viewers were invited to click-through and investigate the many loopholes on Stella’s blog—the part I had the most fun with. I wanted her website to feel eerily untouched since her last entry, so I incorporated dead-ends leading to a chat service site called Club Idaho, a mysterious hacker called The Machine, and the obscure instant-messaging application mentioned only in Mona’s blog called Ivan.

Special thanks to my dad, his computer and Windows Movie Maker, the platform I used to create my own fan-videos in the late 2000s.