hil.st

That the domain hil.st shall be construed, for the purposes of this apparatus, as a twofold sign — at once the abbreviated hill upon which every academy is erected, and the clipped list by which every scholar orders the world. The period intervenes not as punctuation but as punctum [†]: the mark of a caesura, a held breath, an ellipsis that the reader is silently invited to complete.

We therefore take the domain-name as our objet trouvé, the accidental gift of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and proceed to construct about it an edifice of six propositions, each provided with its own apparatus of marginalia, its own figure in blueprint, and its own wax seal in burnt sienna.

It has been the custom, since the Alexandrian grammarians, to set about the received text a second text: a machinery of variae lectiones, conjectures, and cross-references that constitutes the apparatus critici [‡]. This secondary text, once confined to the foot of the page, is here promoted to a column of its own — a persistent marginalia, sticky in the digital sense and sticky in the scholarly sense alike.

The consequence is that the reader is obliged to read twice: first in the principal column, along the descending cascade of propositions, and secondly in the left gutter, where each annotation stands in a relation of gloss, digression, or polite contradiction to the main argument. This constitutes the double narrative of hil.st.

Suppose — for the sake of a counter-factual the site itself inhabits — that Babbage's Analytical Engine had been brought to completion in, say, 1867, and that its operations had been extended, by slow mechanical increments across a hundred and sixty years, to the rendering of hypertext. The pages it would produce are the pages hil.st imitates [§].

In the apparatus column at right, figures are provided in the style of blueprints. A difference engine housed in a cathedral nave; a punch-card reader sheltered beneath a Gothic arch; vacuum tubes arranged, not in cabinets, but in the rose window of a lost abbey. The figures are drawings; the site is the document those drawings annotate.

The ornamental rules that divide these propositions are drawn from a single grammar in which the acanthus and the gear-tooth are not distinct emblems. Each leaf has twelve veins; each gear has twelve teeth [¶]. The coincidence is not decorative but argumentative: vegetation and mechanism are here declared the same subject under two notations, as in botany and horology two notations of Time.

It follows that the decorative border is also a proposition, and that every proposition is also a decorative border. The distinction between argument and ornament, so dear to the sixteenth century and so unfortunate in the twentieth, is here dismantled.

Every surface here is covered, at 6% opacity, by a simulated grain — the fractalNoise of an SVG turbulence filter, composited against a flat field of burnt sienna or smoked ivory [◊]. There is no photograph of paper; there is only the mathematical ghost of paper, performed as a shader over colour.

This is the site's central wager: that materiality can be simulated without being represented. We refuse the photograph and keep the grain. We refuse the parchment and keep the thirst of the parchment. The apparatus, like all scholarly apparatuses, admits what it has lost and then works ingeniously with the absence.

By the sixth proposition the suspicion has, we hope, been raised, that the reader — scrolling, pausing, glancing from marginalia to blueprint and back — is not the audience of this apparatus but its final component. The circuit-trace filigree behind the text is completed only at the point of attention.

Closing, therefore, the reader is respectfully reminded that the engine continues to compile in their absence, that the propositions will re-arrange themselves against the next refresh, and that the marginalia, like all marginalia worth their ink, will outlive the main text [†].