Significant precedents exist for challenging academic form. The work of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus explicitly rejects linear argumentation in favour of a rhizomatic model, while Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage experiments radically with formatting and imagery to mirror its core thesis. Although such radical play may initially appear to clash with established academic norms, working within digital space demands this very experimentation. A central, reflexive question emerges: how can one effectively analyse net art, a medium defined by its subversion of “good” web design and conventional usability, without actively engaging its intrinsic spatial and interactive dimensions? A thesis confined solely to printed text cannot fully interrogate these dynamics. In this spirit, and just as Deleuze and Guattari reimagined the philosophical treatise, I seek to redefine the academic thesis itself through the creation of a website that performs its argument by merging curatorial practice with theoretical inquiry. Conventional academic writing often demands a singular “story”—a clear, logical, and hierarchical narrative. My methodology resists this. The internet is fundamentally rhizomatic: nodes interlink without a fixed hierarchy, each as vital as the next. While the written thesis retains an overarching logical structure, its digital counterpart, the Curatorial Interfaces website, reveals the hidden connections, inviting readers to navigate freely and construct their own pathways. This deliberate duality, both structured and fluid, reflects the hybrid reality of net art itself.

 

This embrace of hybridity is unavoidable when dealing with net art. The physical world persists, and traces of the digital must necessarily seep back into the traditional thesis to create a dialogue. For instance, each printed chapter includes a QR code linking directly to its digital counterpart, ensuring a constant interplay between the analogue and the digital. This mirrors the symbiotic relationship that net art exhibitions increasingly negotiate with physical gallery spaces. Within this framework, hyperlinks, though often technologically overlooked, become critically important. They are the technical mechanism enabling seamless conceptual connections, directly mirroring the rhizomatic structure proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. Unlike the strict, vertical hierarchies of a traditional thesis (acknowledgements, abstract, contents), the website facilitates horizontal, non-linear navigation. This rhizomatic approach opposes binary definitions, such as the stark separation of digital versus physical space, and instead embraces a fluid hybridity. While my thesis text interrogates this hybridity theoretically, the website transcends mere demonstration to embody a structural rebellion against rigid academic conventions.

 

Here, hyperlinks function as a dual indexing system: one layer mimics traditional bibliographic references, akin to Wikipedia, while another, more profound layer weaves an interconnected web of reflective nodes, constituting a true rhizome. This practice finds its theoretical counterpart in Roland Barthes’s description of an ideal text in *S/Z*, which prefigures computer hypertext as being composed of blocks linked by multiple paths in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality. For Barthes, this text is "a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances." It is this concept that allows his distinction between the passively consumed ‘readerly’ text and the actively produced ‘writerly’ text to truly shine. The strategic use of hyperlinks in the Curatorial Interfaces website is a practical enactment of this theory. It transforms the standard academic index into a web of live pathways, inviting the user to choose their own trajectory, draw connections between theorists, and exit the thesis to engage with source artworks on their own terms. This method does not merely cite references; it performs them, compelling the reader to become a writerly collaborator.

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This view of text as a network of links is further supported by Michel Foucault, who in The Archaeology of Knowledge conceives of a book as a "node within a network," whose frontiers are never clear-cut. For me, especially when analysing art that originated on the net, the linear form of traditional academic writing seems profoundly limiting. By inserting hyperlinks throughout the navigation and index of my project, and by linking artworks directly to their original sources, I am exploring this idea of intertextuality, where one concept flows seamlessly into another, opening the research to the reader’s own choices of path and interpretation. As George P. Landow argues, “Hypertext, which is a fundamentally intertextual system, has the capacity to emphasize intertextuality in a way that page-bound text in books cannot.” Through hyperlinking, I investigate how this intertextual connectedness functions within the digital part of the thesis and how the reader establishes their own unique path to communicate with the text. This leads to a crucial decentring of authority; the reader becomes the primary navigator. Landow confirms this, stating that “Hypertext provides an infinitely re-centerable system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the reader.” Although this absence of a fixed centre can be challenging, it means that the user’s own interests become the organising principle for their investigation at any given moment. Through the Curatorial Interfaces indexing system and its network of links, I set out to reimagine the notion of the academic thesis presented as a website, tracing what new connections and meanings this multiplicity of forms can bring to light.