Helen Thorington

I was just cleaning up some old paperwork and stumbled across this letter again. In 2006 I closed the doors of Integration Research, and as a nonprofit with $4,643.31 still in its coffers, that money had to be distributed to other similar nonprofit entities. The organizations we chose were Creative Commons, Rhizome, and Turbulence.org. All three wrote letters to us thanking us for our contributions, but Helen Thorington’s personal response has stayed with me in the intervening years.

I’m stunned.

It’s funny how a simple choice of two words can impact someone.

Of the three, Turbulence.org is the only one no longer in operation. All three were/are important entities in the world of digital art.

Today, I decided to look Helen up. She passed in 2023 at the age of 94.

wikipedia.org / Helen Thorington

You can have a look on archive.org at what turbulence.org looked like around the time we made our donation. You can view an archive of the work it supported and curated at the-next.eliterature.org.

You can listen to some of Helen’s work on archive.org as well.

Here is a French podcast episode from 2018 featuring her. I wish I could understand what she was saying in this audio, but any non-native person speaking French will never not impress me.

The late 90s and early 00s were a golden age for internet art. Alternative artists like Helen brought their rich education and practice from pre-internet art onto the web. The artifacts that these obscure archives manage to maintain are remarkable evidence of the kind of creativity that flourished in the age between Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the World Wide Web in 1989 and the vapidization of all things¹ online enacted by modern social media starting in the late 00s. My humble contribution to that space was inspired by Helen and many others like her.