This page is no longer on this server 2

The theorist George Landow, writing on Hypertext, urges us to forget the usual conceptual elements which hold language together and, instead, use new substitutes ‘such as multilinearity, nodes, links, or networks.’ Elements of syntax - and, when, so, or - are now converted to a range of physical manoeuvres: mouse up, mouse over, mouse down etc. A click now links us to our mediated world.’ In this new world, the internet is often described as a virtual landscape without a horizon but, with the average lifespan of a website measured in months rather than years, in practice it has surprisingly many broken links/dead-ends. Although the web links us to snapshots of ‘history’ in unlimited supply, it has no memory - just a post saying ‘this page is no longer on this server…’

The world of the WWW, like our analogue day-to-day, is always accountable to six degrees of separation. But, in the real world, each separation is in a way, policed by our own moral framework – we can, self-consciously, turn away from violence, pornography etc. The uncanny intersection of our psyche is always a disputed subconscious geography: Freud commenting on the action of the thinking process observes ‘We have found that processes in the unconscious or in the id obey different laws from those in the preconscious ego.’ It is this psychological relationship that governs our creative processes, but the Internet we would argue, hotwires this relationship – jumpstarts, in a surfing environment, the uncanny experience. This hyper-stance between conscious and subconscious must have direct consequences on how we ‘create’

This change to narrative structures is not a new phenomena; technology has always influenced the way we visually navigate our world. The narratives of story telling, songs and pictograms were gradually outmoded by the technological developments of the 19th Century. Walter Benjamin, writing at the time, describes a moving away from the traditional links of language - the narratives of story telling etc. were being replaced by the mechanically reproduced image which, each like ‘mini explosions’, were displayed as photographs, cinema clips and so on.

Perhaps the link on the webpage is today’s mini explosion – each click takes us into a new realm: a new page, image or sonic experience. Web designer Peter Luining has created a site, clickclub, which is without content except link buttons, another web artist recently produced a faux porn site where, upon entering, you are shown a provocative image of a naked body with the genitals covered by a link button. Each time you click on the button you open another window with increasingly fractured images of naked bodies and more buttons…. You never get to the fully naked body. On this site, the frustration is two-fold, it reminds us of how we consume the visual image and how, like channel surfing, the link has become the fetish itself… constantly zapping to capture what we might be missing. The question we ask; in our broadband, WiFi, Bluetooth linked world; is there anything left to miss?…

Colin + Monika

This an updated version of a essay originally posted here