Stochastic Neighbors is a series of prints based on the Archive Team’s 2009 GeoCities backup, in which the visual contents of the thematic neighborhoods are organized using a t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding algorithm. Each neighborhood contains hundreds of thousands of images that are sorted by visual similarity.
GeoCities was a popular online community in the late 1990s, modeled after a city in cyberspace. This spatial metaphor was used not only to organize homepages into neighborhoods and streets, but also worked as an invitation to populate cyberspace and contribute user-generated content to the nascent internet. After being acquired by Yahoo! in 1999, it was shut down in 2009 after new metaphors of the internet had taken root. A backup of 35 million homepages is what remains of this digital Pompeii. Stochastic Neighbors is a reflection on this archive using machine learning algorithms.