One of my long-standing interests is 1980s female bodybuilders, as I enjoy looking at photos of women with chiseled muscle. Because this could be considered a niche interest, its archives are maintained by a devoted community of enthusiasts who go to great lengths to collect scans of magazines, VHS transfers of competitions, posters, training manuals, and everything in between. This shared devotion makes it a rich corner of the internet to wander. Most of these pages do not feel commercial; they exist to preserve and share a world of sculpted, shiny muscle. Of all the websites buried in my bookmarks, one stands out: benchpresschampion.com. It may be one of the most exhaustive listings of bench press competitions across federations worldwide, documenting lifters’ records, body measurements, competition rules, photographs, and instructions on how to design posters for your own events. The banner on the homepage claims twenty-five years of updates, which would date its creation to around 2001, something the aesthetic confirms immediately. The site is a testament to early web design: bright colours, static images, tables arranging content into grids, and underlined links clearly made to be clicked. It belongs to the visual vocabulary of the early 2000s web, a time when a plethora of websites were built by passionate amateurs. While clicking through its sections, I opened a tab labelled “HUMOUR,” guided by curiosity and the hope of a good joke. Expecting memes, I was instead confronted with a grid of tiny thumbnails, each paired with a short caption. The image compression means that thumbnails must be clicked to reveal a larger version in a separate tab. One image in particular caught my attention,a hyper-muscular drawing of Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion, made by the artist RENtb. The style was immediately familiar, growing up online in the 2010s and watching anime meant inevitably encountering DeviantArt, a platform known for amateur art, anime fanart and fetish content, spanning a broad gradient from innocuous to NSFW imagery. Still, seeing this kind of image within a bench press archive felt like an unexpected and curious choice. A few clicks and many other questionable images later, I noticed a crucial detail I had somehow missed. The founder of the site is Père Pascal Girard, self-described as “webmaster, champion and priest.”¹ The realisation took a moment to process. First came the amazement of discovering that a priest was behind the creation and maintenance of such a detailed international bench press archive. Then came a more disturbing realisation: this same priest had not only seen hyper-muscular Rei Ayanami, but deliberately downloaded it and uploaded it onto his own website. At that moment, the contained world and curation of it, neatly organised and earnest, slipped. The realisation of the intentionality behind every curatorial choice reframed how I perceived the archive, and how I understood my own position as its viewer. A collapse occurred, not dramatic, but sufficient to give a new perspective on the website. I could suddenly imaginethe human behind it: his tastes, curiosities, contradictions, and the corners of the internet he had wandered through, all uncomfortably similar to mine. At the same time, I became acutely aware of myself as another human visitor navigating a world someone else had built. The aesthetic I explore in this essay is what I call world collapsing. It describes a sensation ,both intellectual and physical, that occurs when one realises that there is (or at least used to be) a person on the other side of the screen, behind the website, a body with their own complexity, contradictions, and desires. This awareness changes how the content is perceived, while simultaneously reminding the viewer, through the discomfort, that they too, have a body behind the screen engaging with the digital space. In what appears to be a solitary encounter with a website, one becomes aware of a shared environment, inhabited by many, including priests. World collapsing happens when small cracks appear in the fourth wall of the interface, as the clean separation between the online and the embodied self is broken, whether voluntarily or not. The screen does not shatter completely, but the ground beneath it begins to feel unstable. These cracks can take many forms: an unusual navigation choice, an outdated layout, a strange or humorous image, or a personal trace left where it was not expected. The collapse functions as a tipping point, it does not radically change the site, but reframes it, shedding new light on its content and creating a new perspective. Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff argues that the virtual should not be understood as the opposite of the real; rather, virtuality is a condition through which humanity is reconsidered and reconfigured. In virtual worlds, the self is destabilised and thrown off balance, not erased.² This moment of imbalance aligns closely with the sensation of world collapsing. The collapse is the moment when that instability becomes perceptible, when the fiction of separation between digital and embodied selves briefly fails. A world can only collapse if it has first been built. The stability of the page, its apparent coherence of layout, tone, content, and curation is what makes the rupture meaningful. Once the constructed nature of the world becomes visible, the shift is both unsettling and captivating as it produces a mix of surprise, discomfort, and curiosity. In this sense, world collapsing can function as an aesthetic strategy that exposes the hidden relationship between digital content, its maker, and its viewer. This exposure emphasises proximity and feels voyeuristic, intimate, or awkward. Yet it is also generative, revealing that digital worlds are built, and therefore capable of cracking open. To understand why benchpresschampion.com produces this sensation so intensely, it is necessary to consider the visuals of the early web. Between the mid-1990s and early 2000s, many personal websites were built by amateurs motivated by enthusiasm rather than optimisation and usability convention. Their creation was shaped by technical limitations as much as by curiosity and a desire to share. Olia Lialina describes this era as the “vernacular web,” characterised by designs that foregrounded the presence of the maker rather than hiding it behind seamless interfaces.³ Programs such as Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe PageMill, and Dreamweaver, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, allowed users to place text, images, tables, and banners directly onto a canvas without manually writing code. This produced a recognisable aesthetic: layouts structured by HTML tables, default system fonts, bright colours, horizontal rules, and heavily compressed images. HTML existed in a far simpler and more rigid form than today, and CSS styling was rudimentary. Many elements that now read as design decisions were the consequence of what these tools allowed or not. One particularly engaging aspect of exploring early web spaces is image compression. Images often require clicking to open in a new tab, so you can never be too sure of what you will get, and this uncertainty can keep you wandering. These sites were also spaces of contact. Nearly every page included an email address, an open invitation to reach the webmaster. In this sense, early web spaces were relational, even when focused on niche content. Whoever, the digital landscape nowadays is no longer the web of amateurs it used to be, and self expression and curation is not made through personal blogs but across social media and platforms not only made for the display and commercialisation of online self and intimacy. On such platforms, world building is expected for not only businesses but also individuals using them. In this shift from the handmade web to the optimised web, collapse no longer comes from an excess of humanity leaking through the interface, but from its sudden and noticeable return within systems designed to operate without friction or surprise. One of my other hobbies, after looking at muscular women, is wandering on Google Maps. While browsing reviews of historical landmarks, I once encountered a collection of images posted by a user: a person deliberately posing in front of a decrepit tower, dressed in women’s clothing,. The images were careful and intentional, clearly part of a personal project. Clicking on their profile revealed a collection of similar images, all uploaded to Google Maps rather than a social media platform. A tool meant for navigation and information had become a stage for self-representation. This unexpected choice produced a sense of intimacy. You are not just seeing a place, but seeing it through what someone chooses to show you, themselves. It generated a collapse: a moment when a platform’s intended use is subverted, and a body asserts itself through an unintended channel. I felt something similar when I discovered that some people use Marktplaats not to sell items, but to look for friendship and kinship.World collapsing occurs when someone bends a platform to make it their own personal space, and the viewer catches a glimpse of that appropriation and the person behind it. The collapse is a shift in perspective that reveals human presence and deviation within systems that usually feel stable, neutral, or purely functional. What functions as an aesthetic strategy here is the familiarity of the platform and its defined purpose. Google Maps is meant for navigation and orientation; Marktplaats for buying and selling. Yet if we consider what these platforms afford, rather than their intended purposes, other uses emerge. Google Maps allows users to upload images tied to places, build personal archives, and situate their bodies both digitally and geographically. Marktplaats similarly allows images, descriptions, and location data, not unlike dating platforms. When the deviation becomes visible and meaningful, it reveals the embodied human presence on platform designed to feel impersonal or transactional. ****I was taught how to navigate internet spaces from a young age. In primary school, I was taught that blue links were meant to be clicked, how to conduct proper research on Google, and how to send polite emails with appropriate greetings. Growing up queer, curious, and deeply online in the 2010s, I spent much of my free time binging ecchi manga, talking on Skype with friends I met on a Minecraft server, and reading lesbian fanfiction. Being drawn to niche interests and anime girls meant venturing into spaces such as DeviantArt, often considered inappropriate. These spaces offered glimpses of a wide range of unsettling, inappropriate, and sometimes disturbing content. For me, the internet was intensely personal, yet clearly separated from my offline self. Researching for this essay made me realise how significant that separation once felt. When people, images, or interactions breached that boundary, it produced a distinct sensation, a mix of physical and emotional discomfort, that I now recognise as a collapse: a moment where digital and embodied self briefly intersected. One of the earliest moments where this boundary collapse became explicit was encountering STILL LIFE: BETAMALE (2013) by Jon Rafman and Oneohtrix Point Never in a museum context. The video assembles low-resolution footage pulled from online spaces such as 4chan, fetish sites, hentai, cosplay, webcam livestreams, and bondage furry content. Removed from their original context, the intimate space of the personal computer, and presented in a physical exhibition space, these images produced an uncanny confrontation between online subcultures and spectatorship. This play on the intersection between online and IRL can also be found in the artwork of Meriem Bennani. In projects such as For My Best Family, Bennani uses 3D animation and documentary-style narration to tell semi-autobiographical stories that explore fractured identities, gender, and contemporary modes of togetherness shaped by digital technologies. The work of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley further develops this collapse as a deliberate strategy. Her videogames and digital environments, such as Resurrection Lands, require users to confront their own positionality as they move through archives of Black trans experience. Drawing on her own stated practice of centering Black trans bodies and lived experiences, that are otherwise relegated to the margins and whose stories have been erased. Brathwaite-Shirley constructs worlds that are coherent and immersive, yet designed to confront the person being the screen. Her assertion that “how you feel is the medium” transforms collapse from an accidental realisation into a tool. The discomfort produced is intentional, forcing the viewer to reckon with their role not only in the digital production of identity and power, but also at the space one’s occupy in society, and how they position themselves in regards to minoritised and invisibilised groups. However, a crucial component of world collapsing I have not yet addressed is nostalgia. I am no longer twelve years old; my innocence is long gone. Moments of collapse are easier to identify in earlier internet spaces, partly because they belong to a time when boundaries between online and offline felt clearer. Searching for contemporary examples proved to be more difficult as the boundary is getting blurrier. Julia Fox, in Daniel Felstead’s video The Metaverse in Janky Capitalism, articulates this shift succinctly, noting that online and offline are no longer separate spaces one enters and exits. Planetary-scale computation has collapsed these distinctions, making collapse itself harder to pinpoint. This fusion becomes particularly visible in the fashion industry. Fashion today operates not merely as a system of garments but as a system of worlds. Felstead describes fashion as a world-building technology, drawing on Ursula K. Le Guin, functioning as an interface between humans and material reality while manipulating what McKenzie Wark terms “vectors of information.”Luxury fashion brands construct universes through campaigns, digital platforms, archives, and narratives. These worlds are maintained through seamless interfaces, hyper-curated Instagram grids, frictionless e-commerce experiences, and influencer-driven storytelling. The garment becomes the physical incarnation of a carefully constructed digital narrative. Yet if world collapsing involves revealing the bodies on the other side of the screen, it can be used not only to point towards the bodies wearing the garments that come into focus, but the bodies producing them. This world-building masks material realities, as the digital sheen of fashion obscures labour conditions, supply chains, and exploitation. Karl Marx describes commodity fetishism as the process through which objects have an independent value and power, obscuring the relationships between workers, owners, and consumers. Contemporary fashion platforms intensify this concealment. The interface is designed precisely to avoid collapse, to preserve a fiction of coherence, opulence, and immaterial consequence. Collapse occurs when that fiction cracks, briefly revealing the labouring bodies beneath. By outlining world collapsing as an aesthetic strategy, it can become a tool to highlight bodies that are being invisibilised as the online and offline worlds merge which one another. The discomfort experienced by the realisation of the hidden body could be a way to question how one position themselves in the world, if processed through curiosity instead of rejection, and can lead to recognition In my own practive, I’m interested in researching