Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Mark Amerika
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Online: Link
41%
Hypertextual Consciousness. 1995. Website
This work is an early experiment in writing for the web; it's a labyrinth of hyperlinked texts. Different pages have different background colors — mustard, white, peppy green — which provides a bit of visual substance. Beyond this, the work's experimentation with the optical possibilities of the internet is scant, close to nonexistent. As for the text, it's mostly navel-gazing pseudo-analysis about hypertext as a form of writing. (Here and there are narrative passages, which are better than the theory parts but still lead-footed and forced if we're judging them as literature, which we should. [Like: “Fuck sell-jobs. I wanna think of other things. Like blowjobs.” and “I link therefore I am.”]) Hypertextual Consciousness finds itself saying quite a bit about what hypertext could do as an aesthetic form (instantiating deconstructionist philosophy, basically), but it seldom actually does any of it. This seems to have been a common problem during the early years of internet art: the artistic potential of the web was way too dauntingly huge for a generation of artists still hung-over from the anti-aesthetic to do anything with but gape and intellectualize (rather than make). (2025)