Phantom Archives [related: Ear Chasm]
A digital archiving program launched by Phantom Access Technologies (PAT) in 1997. The platform was accessed through PAT's revolutionary and aggressively strange ISP MindVox and reportedly conceptualized and implemented by Lord Digital and Phiber Optik following the latter's release from prison in 1995. Phantom Archives (PA) was presented as a kind of digital scrapbooking tool with a highly customizable template, oriented largely around the experience of digitized audio and, later, video [1]. Upon its haphazard beta launch, Phantom Archives (PA) became central in the documentation and (relative) popularization of New York-based No Wave music, in part due to the overlap of the hacking community and musicians exploring experimental R&B, free jazz, post-disco, and early hip-hop.
Because of the archival nature of PA, the identity of the user was essentially obscured and was often thought to include the entity being archived. Much of the material archived on PA was reportedly created years earlier, including some music and imagery dating from the late 1970's and early 1980's. As part of the PA template, users were able to choose from a large variety of pre-made 3-D modeled icons [2], title fonts, and a two-color scheme. Pages in the PA platform became known as contags - a portmanteau of "content" and "aggregate" - each dedicated to the documentation of a particular entity. A banner area topped each PA contag including the contag icon and contag title drop shadowed over an auto-desaturated wallpaper image that could be either chosen from a predetermined set or, later, directly uploaded by the user.
Below the banner area PA featured an infinitely scrolling scrapbook area. The area was gridded in fixed format using the two contag colors chosen by the user. On the gridded area users could position an endless selection of six content modules, or contmods. These contmods included four created by PAT and two created by outside vendors:
PAT Contmods:
- image box (with optional dithering and rudimentary paintbrush capabilities)
- text box [3] (with hyperlynx)
- video player (can be used for audio with fixed image)
- timeline (a buggy feature still in beta mode when the platform was abandoned)
Outside Vendor Contmods:
- photo gallery (pop up feature for viewing a collection of related images, including captions)
- EarChasm™ (an audio player with fashionable assorted skins, user-uploaded artwork, pop-up lyric pane including hyperlynx, and various Easter eggs)
Users were able to arrange their various contmods on the scrapbooking grid as they wished - including an option to "funky offset" (tilting the contmod approx 10 degrees in either direction) and "overlay" (having the corners of two contmods overlap). The scrapbooking grid scrolled infinitely downward as controlled by a right-pinned gray scrolling bar, though an overabundance of content (even without video) led to gargantuan loading times. Users were later able to create lynx directly to specific positions in the grid. Although highly functional, the PA platform experienced a gaussian decline into disuse throughout the waning years of the millennium due to mismanagement and the reckless allocation of the vast majority of PAT's financial resources towards the development of the afore-mentioned 3-D users icons and an embeddable, but functionally unusable, video module.
- ↑ Although video embeds were a defining feature of the PA platform, snail-speed bandwidth's limited video streaming access almost exclusively to patrons of @Cafe and other early cyber cafes with T-1 Line access.
- ↑ The icons featured cutting edge technology and 3-D design - creation of the icons alone was thought to have cost PAT over $500,000, contributing to a growing mountain of debt that would eventually squash any efforts at monetizing the platform.
- ↑ Caption fields for image and video entries were offered to users as a derivation of the text box contmod.