Arguably, computers are just as customizable, if you care to put in the effort.īut you see what I mean, now? Winamp skins, dude.
Perhaps all I’m really missing is a period of my life when I had time and energy to mess about with that sort of thing. (And I do.) You could argue that we’ve traded into this chaotic customization for convenience. You’ll get your Discover playlist, and you’ll like it. Spotify, compared to Winamp, seems passive. There was also something about having to sort through files and dig up album art that encouraged a sort of engagement with music that feels, to me, very different to today’s streaming model. I could customize Winamp skins, sure, but also my whole desktop, down to my extremely carefully collated music collection. Personally, they remind me of an era when it felt like I had more control over my computer. This is the weird thing about Winamp skins, though: they don’t just capture a visual aesthetic, but a mode of interaction with technology. But perhaps that would have been too much for today’s modern, sleek UIs to handle. The only disappointment is that the format of the museum doesn’t lend itself to supporting the stranger skins that transformed the size and shape of Winamp’s various elements. On display, you can see anime skins, gaming skins, communist skins, sci-fi skins, skins dedicated to particular artists, and a cornucopia of indescribable vibes in between. It has all of the artistic value of a national art gallery, but it focuses in on late-’90s / early-’00s aesthetics with enough raw energy to bring back nü metal. The taste on display in the Winamp Skin Museum is, in a word, stunning. On Twitter, Eldredge notes he’s still taking collections for the project if you have any skins you want to donate, and he describes the collection as capturing “an iconic moment in internet art history.”
The skins were previously collected on the Internet Archive but assembled into this new accessible format by Facebook engineer Jordan Eldredge. Infinite scroll through 65k Winamp skins with instant search and in-browser interactive preview /JbCbtiFAw2- Jordan Eldredge September 3, 2020 Finally ready to share the Winamp Skin Museum
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