CHIMERA HEAVEN

Chimera Heaven is an artistic archive where I explore the intimate and often overlooked relationships between anonymous individuals and their pets. Inspired by gifcities.org‒a project by Dragan Espenschied and Olia Lialina that preserves GIFs from the early internet‒I navigated through countless hyperlinks to old Geocities pages, searching for sites dedicated to beloved family pets. From memorials for hamsters and tributes to cats, to even a page about a puma, these digital shrines reveal something timeless and deeply human: the desire to immortalize non-human family members online. Viewed through the Wayback Machine, as these pages have been inaccessible since 2009, they now exist as time capsules, offering glimpses of a lost era of the web. The gradual disappearance of links and images echoes the fragility of human memory. As someone who grew up at the tail end of "the old web," I witnessed its fading but was too young to fully grasp its significance. Working on this project reminded me that, like the pets once cherished on these pages, the old web is largely gone‒but fragments endure thanks to the GIF archives, preserving slivers of these memories. The baby moose angel GIF is my personal contribution to this hyperlink archive‒a newly created animated spirit that watches over the other preserved animal GIFs, serving as both a guardian and a tribute to the act of remembering.