towards progress (sometimes while thwarting this ideology at the same time, as in the above examples). Back in the 1980s, as the computer was on its way to becoming the paradigmatic medium, they are the ones who created the aesthetic conditions under which the viewer was able to practice his/her altered role, that of user.[32] By browsing through hypertextual narrative structures, users could develop the skills that made it possible for them to deal with audio-visual information with only tenuous and obscure links to reality. They practiced producing meaning from that which cannot be said, and found a way to access images that do not illustrate anything. They navigated through a system of related meanings, learning through referentiality to form temporary «stories.» The video installations of the 1990s could then build on this connective competence in constituting meaning. They translated rhizomatic thinking into the medium of video/film and tried in this way to transform this analogue medium. Despite, or better, because of the fact that the artists make use of a medium that is organized chronologically/ sequentially and does not per se suggest non-linear narrative methods as does the digital medium, their

video art succeeds in raising the expectation of a causally motivated narrative sequence, only to ultimately dissolve this expectation into hypertextual structures. The hypertextual storytelling technique that has been widespread since the 1980s is motivated primarily by the fact that the artists are not interested in representing reality, but rather in generating reality. The new dimensions of the real that emerge thereby are not fixed but in motion and can continually change their constellations. A space ripe with possibilities opens up—a space for playing with potential, with virtual narrations.

Translation by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida