This post is to announce a new piece of performative restoration, made by Tara Donovan-Achi, a student in the Traditions and Revolutions project at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, led by Dragan Espenschied and myself last semester.
Tara writes:
“Going through One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Archive I came across the so-called Papercat and realised how important it was back in the days. A web cat before LOLcats! It is fascinating because it seems to break through the imaginary wall, as if there is something behind the browser. A room? A garden? Cyberspace?
Early browsers didn’t necessarily implement the GIF89a specification correctly, and this animation was originally made for buggy browsers. While it displays nicely up to Netscape version 3, later browsers have the cat disappear and leave a closed eye behind. There is also an issue with transparent pixels that obviously should be opaque white.
I decided to bring Papercat back to life, to the modern web. “
papercat.geocities.institute showcases a repaired animation, a high-dpi version and 113 wallpapers the cat was bursting through on pages saved in the 1TB archive. But that’s not all. Papercat2k16 got the paws and the tail and… everything what was behind the wall and wallpapers. Enjoy! (if possible in Chrome)
P.S.: Papercat’s earliest (September 1996) appearance in the archive:
