Net-art & hypermedia environment · 1995–2001
Hypergraphia n.
The word this site is named after.
The site
A sprawling environment on the Netscape-era web — poems, newspaper columns, a literary magazine, a photographic exhibition — built from hand-made GIFs, HTML, and Shockwave, when 28.8 kbps was the recommended minimum. Poetry you navigated, years before the tools had names for it.
160+ pages · GIF, HTML & Shockwave · Netscape era · 28.8 kbps minimum recommended
The entry hall, as preserved — the server copy of May 1997. It still renders in a browser today.
The branches
The navigation map sorted the pages into branches — subramas. Two of them.
La Noria Digital
"The Digital Ferris Wheel"
Net-art poetry on black — El Aereonauta, Electroencefalograma, Niña en sueño profundo, Miniluz, Carrusel. Titles you clicked into, each its own small world.
Mi Semana Tortural / Mi Tortura Semanal
A wordplay: "my tortural week / my weekly torture"
The Saturday columns Bonilla wrote for the Mexico City newspaper El Nacional, gathered into the artwork — the career's journalistic origin, preserved inside the poetry.
The magazine inside the site
Born on paper in February 1992 — staples and a two-ink couché cover — the poetry magazine Péndulo moved onto the young web and became, in its own words on the page, "desde Marzo de 1995, la Primera Revista Electrónica Literaria de México en la WWW" — the first Mexican electronic literary magazine on the web. Poesía · Narrativa · Teatro · Entrevista · Ensayo · Celulósicas · La Plástica · Ensueños. This is where the site's "since 1995" begins.
The name at work
Before it was net-art, Hypergraphia was also a company — among the earliest internet ventures in Mexico, in the mid-1990s — and the name carried both lives at once. Its earlier identity survives on the site under the heading "Lo que era antes Hypergraphia…": a jeweled-sphere trademark banner.
From its founders came a printed book on the young commercial web — Mercadotecnia e Imagen en Internet, by Diego Bonilla and José de Jesús Del Toro, the poet who returns, fifteen years later, as the writer of Liber Rotavi.
Found online, 1999
In 1999 the poet and scholar Rodolfo Mata, of UNAM, came across Hypergraphia online — the beginning of a collaboration that runs through Poesía Densa (2003) to the Tablada hipertextual (2020). Del Toro, co-author of the venture's book, returns as the poet of Liber Rotavi (2012). And the name itself never stopped: the domain, the practice, and this thirty-year retrospective all kept it.
Its most direct descendant is the site you are reading.
The artifact
The Shockwave and PowerPoint pieces sleep — their players are gone — but the HTML and GIF pages still render in a modern browser, unchanged. The archive holds dated copies of the server across the years; the time-series is itself an artifact.
The original Director sources — including a piece named "random Text interface" — are preserved. A native re-creation is a project for another time.
Credits
Diego Bonilla — concept, design, writing, programming · 1995–2001.
With the online magazine Péndulo, and José de Jesús Del Toro (co-author of the venture's book).