Internet Phone Book, indexed by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost. [A process image showing the call for submissions for the Internet Phone Book from April 4, 2024 on one side, and a photo of the printed book from April 7, 2025 on the other. A twisty-turny arrow points from the earlier image to the latter, illustrating ~the passage of time.~]
Meg Miller: How did you two first start working on the Internet Phone Book?
Elliott Cost: Last November I was in Athens visiting Kristoffer, and at that time we were starting to work on the diagram.website project. We were meeting up at Adad Books, a bookstore/cafe that was between the place that I was staying and Kristoffer’s house. We would have coffee there and talk about the diagram.website idea, and during those meetings, we also started throwing around this idea of something physical that would be an introduction or primer for exploring the poetic web.
Kristoffer Tjalve: We were talking about how to make things that are tangible and physical and also claim space outside of the online space. How can these conversations and websites that excite us be represented in the physical space?
[A pair of hands holds the phone book open to a six column spread of entries peppered with illustrations and images. Sunlight hits the small round table behind it, where a yellow drink sits.]
Elliott: Another thing that really excited me during those initial conversations was that we were sitting in a book shop and I had a vision of this yellow book in different bookshops around the world. They would give a way into the poetic web without having to go on Google and go through these algorithms that curate how you see things. People would just submit their websites to this directory, then we publish it annually and it ends up in people's hands. So in that way, it felt like the most accessible version of the poetic web that we could create.
Meg: How are you guys defining the poetic web?
Kristoffer: There's the literal reading of the poetic web — exploring poetry represented on the web, or how poems live on a website, which obviously lends itself to different possibilities compared to a physical page or a printed book. I really love how people like Chia [Amisola] are exploring what can be done with that. The HTML Review is also such a vast source for people exploring poetry for the web.
But where I resonate with poetry is more in the metaphorical and the suggestive potential of poems. They are less definitive compared to something like nonfiction. They are more about talking in images and metaphors and breaking logic. I think there is something to this whole “poetic web” idea and the people contributing to this scene, which is that they defy the logic of the web somehow. Their sites look a bit different. Maybe they're a bit more idiosyncratic, maybe they're just very silly or there's something that makes them not very mainstream, they don’t follow the conventional wisdom of web design.
[Webpage for the Internet Phone Book with a soft yellow background, an image, and a description of the publication.]
Meg: I also wanted to talk to you about why you wanted to gather the poetic web into the form of a directory or phone book. Kristoffer, you write really nicely in the book’s introduction about the influences and predecessors to this type of project. What kinds of things were you looking to as you were putting this together?
Kristoffer: I think at first it was just a silly idea, we were just thinking about how we could connect with other people who have similar interests. But then I quite quickly realized when I started to research that this was a real thing in the ’90s, when there were actually several publications around the theme of “the yellow pages of the internet.” In that sense I realized this is a step back. Before we had personal feeds and search, this was how people discovered things on the internet — through lists. And sometimes these were printed into physical books that were then placed next to computers at libraries.
That only made me more excited because I think there's a need to connect people outside of the primary platforms of the internet. These days it's not as much about finding a specific site you’re searching for, but just being reminded of the vastness of the web and finding ways to keep exploring it instead of settling on any monolithic version of the internet.
Elliott: Another thing that's nice about it being a directory is that it kind of creates a sense of community around these people working in similar ways or in different parts of the web. It collects them together. When we were putting everything together and gathering the submissions, Kristoffer had the idea of having an open field where people could write a blurb describing their website. That's my favorite part of the book — all these people talking about their websites and what they think they are. Maybe that speaks to your previous question about what the poetic web is. I think it's a very personal thing, or it means something different to everybody, and it's beautiful to read these little blurbs.
[An entry to the phone book by Jo Suk with a blurb that begins “Pretend we’re at my house, and you’re my guest, and I just offered you tea...”]
Kristoffer: Yeah I like what you said about connecting people. This was not really on my mind while making the book, but I’ve been thinking more recently about civil society clubs, whether it's a gymnastic club or garden club or whatever. Often they have magazines to share news with the group. There's one here in the Mediterranean called the Mediterranean Garden Society, and they print this very cute zine. There is also a list of gardens within this community, etc. So they have this directory component, and I think it's a really nice way of creating a community feeling, or a cohesion across localities. There are people who are interested in the same subject but they don't necessarily live near each other. But when we create this artifact, suddenly they're next to each other, right?
[A close up of a page of the phone book with a quote from Kalo Kolev: “Is there a website only you can remember?”]
Meg: What was the process for getting entries for the Internet Phone Book? I'm trying to remember — was it just a call for participation?
Kristoffer: We had an open call that we shared within our own channels, and then it spread through quite a few newsletters and Are.na blocks, etc.
Meg: Do you both have websites in the book?
Kristoffer: Yeah.
Elliott: Yeah.
Kristoffer: Yours too, Meg.
Elliott: I remember with Meg’s website, I think you mentioned in the blurb that Laurel [Schwulst] made it, and then Laurel’s site is also in the directory and her essay is in there, too. So you start to see these little connections between the entries. That's quite nice. I feel like in a future edition we could even go further with that kind of hyperlinking within the book. We do a little bit of that in this edition, but it could be nice to play around with that more.
[Meg’s entry to the phone book, which credits Laurel for building it.]
Kristoffer: I submitted my site cloudlord.management, which I don't know if that’s a personal website actually — it's me maintaining it, but it's also like, I don't know what it really is. It felt almost like violating our criteria, and then we were also discussing along the way if we should only have websites from individuals or if we also accept collectives. For example, the artist collective Hundred Rabbits submitted their site, and I think that project is one of the more interesting things happening on the internet, so it felt wrong to not include them. But then we also had this arbitrary rule that it should be a single person.
For a second edition I would maybe de-emphasize the personal side. When we say “personal,” it's a representation of a curiosity or of something we care for. But for some people, when they hear “personal,” they think it needs to be a bio site or a representation of themselves. That’s an interpretation that we don't necessarily intend — we don't want to enforce that it's only a first-name-last-name.com site kind of thing. We also want stranger explorations. So we have some tweaking to do in the next call for entries.
[A pill yellow webpage with a simple line drawing of a cell phone surrounded by cruder (cuter) drawings of flowers. On the screen of the phone is text that reads “Welcome to dial-a-site. Enter the site’s number in the dial pad below.”]
Meg: One of my favorite features of the book is the ‘dial-a-site’ system, which cleverly tethers the printed book back to the network it documents. Can you describe how it works, and the other metadata for each site that you decided to include?
Elliott: There’s a little number next to each entry that has a telephone icon and that's our dial-a-site feature. You can go to internetphonebook.net/dial and type in the number. Then you'll be forwarded to the website so you don't have to type in a long url.
We also have time zones for each entry, and that could be the server time zone or where the person is. It kind of grounds each website and makes it feel a little bit more like there's a person behind each one and that they're located somewhere on earth. And then we have the weight of the website — how many megabytes or kilobytes it takes to load over connection.
The last symbol we have is that sometimes we put a little flower next to websites that we thought were extra poetic.
[Kirsten Spruit’s entry in the phone book. The entry has Kirsten’s name, the url of her site, a dial-a-website number 238, time zone CET, 29.3 KB and an illustration of a flower.]
Meg: The weight of the website is interesting to include, it’s a subtle way to introduce or reinforce the concept that websites can be heavier or lighter, they can use up more or less energy. It also feels like with the different symbols, you have created multiple access points for people to meander through the book non-linearly, and discover the different websites.
Kristoffer: This is a little bit unrelated to what we’ve spoken about so far, but one thing that really excites me about making the book and developing it further is that we wanted it to feel official, so we wanted to have an ISBN number, which here in Greece was such a process. In the end, I went with an ISSN number, which is for the periodicals, because it was easier to do that since we were self publishing. One of the curiosities of getting an ISSN number here in Greece, which is free, is that you need to submit two copies to the national library, and then they archive it. So now it will be in the Greek library for as long as they can maintain it, which is probably a very long time.
I got really excited thinking about how public and civic infrastructures were very important in shaping the early web. The library was where most of us first got on the internet. And I find it very important with whatever comes next for the web, that we re-invite this public society and civic infrastructure back into the internet as caretakers. I also love that over the years there will be this big archive of websites in the Greek library, as well as whatever libraries decide to acquire a copy.
[A shot of the phone book laying on the table with the back cover visible.]
Meg: That’s really nice that the Greek system does that. What a perk of doing this in print, too. I had been following your Are.na channel documenting the press check / printing of the book, and I wanted to ask about the process of creating a physical book, which is different from a lot of the projects you two work on that are more digital. How was it?
Elliott: Oh well, it was a lot more complex than I ever thought [laugh]. Coming from making a lot of websites and making a lot of web directories, there's something beautiful about just being able to publish and then update things continually. It was also interesting because the way that we made the book was as a website. We used this open source, browser based software where everything is written in HTML, so the whole book is HTML and it's styled in CSS. It creates a PDF out of your website, sort of like going to a website and going command + P to print.
So it was a nice process, but then when it came time to print it was hard to let go of changing little things at the last minute. Then there was the whole process of finding a printer and figuring out distribution. It's very complex, so much work.
Meg: Yeah, so scary, so expensive, so rewarding [laugh]. What’s in store for the next editions? Will you do the same process again?
Kristoffer: We’ll do another call for submissions. Certain things will remain the same, but I would also expect that it evolves a bit. This time, the essays that we included in the book are all very website-focused, which is cool. I think in the second edition it would be nice to branch out a little bit and maybe have something about how to host your own solar server, that kind of thing.
One thing that I would like to focus on as well are the physical spaces around the world — Extra Practice and Varia in Rotterdam, HEART in New York, Birdcall in Seoul, Ljudmila and Aksioma in Ljubljana, Panke Gallery in Berlin — which are in my opinion quite important connection points for the poetic web. I feel like those need to be more prominent in the book. There’s the question of, where do you find these people online? But I think there's also this question of how you actually connect to what's happening and to the conversations. How do you create these spaces where stronger bonds can be formed that then can also enable certain things to happen? I think this book wouldn't have happened without Naive Yearly [a conference Kristoffer runs] because that was the first time Elliott and I got to meet in person. We shouldn't undermine the relevance of bringing people together in different ways, whether in more temporary spaces or in more permanent ones.
[A close up of one of Elliott’s illustrations, this one of coffee cups and a flower vase. The text below it tells the story of meeting after Naive Yearly in Ljubljana.]
Elliott: It makes sense that the phone book would move in different directions based on our interests at the time of creating it. That's something that I find nice about this edition, which is that it’s very tied to things that we were already doing. We included the diagram.website in the first few pages of the book. We also sprinkled in drawings from Naive Yearly and photos from Ana [Santl], and different things like that. Grounding it in other things that are going on in our communities is something I would hope that continues in future editions. I think it will.
My hope for the book is that it broadens people's understanding and perspective of what the web is. There's this notion of people just using social media and that's the extent of the web. But I think what Are.na is doing, what many of us are doing, is trying to broaden that perspective a little bit. There are still people making interesting, cool, poetic websites out there.
[The phone book on a sunny day.]
Internet Phone Book is now available in the Are.na Gift Shop.
Meg Miller is editorial director at Are.na.
Elliott Cost writes HTML. He tends to elliott.computer, special.fish, gossipsweb.net, html.energy, and other poetic sites. He is part of Extra Practice, a space for working and learning in the north of Rotterdam. Previously, he helped design and develop The Creative Independent.
Kristoffer Tjalve is the owner-operator of Cloudlord.management, an internet surreal estate holding company. He works as an independent organizer from his studio in Athens, Greece. He is dedicated to the web as a medium, material, and philosophy, and works across formats, from websites to awards, conferences, and printed publications. His practice is centered around nurturing environments where emerging practitioners and narratives flourish to keep the web spirit alive.