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Vanish Pointer
Individual
experimental
Vanish Pointer by Hyunseo Cho (as used on the Softwear Directory)
Vanish Pointer is a web-based project by Hyunseo Cho that reimagines the digital interface as a three-dimensional, perspective-based space. Designed as both a web extension and a standalone platform, this tool establishes an analogy between our perception of web interfaces and the visual system of perspective. Users can shift the vanishing point to explore websites from new angles, transforming flat webpages into dynamic spatial environments where citational elements — such as sources, authors, dates and internal references — become central structuring forces. Users can invert hierarchies, reveal hidden relationships, and explore multidimensional connections by changing their viewpoint — including curvilinear, panoramic, and spherical perspectives. Vanish Pointer thus encourages critical and sensory engagement with the knowledge architectures that shape online content.
In an age where information circulates endlessly, is remixed and is decontextualised, developing visual citation methods is not just a matter of giving credit; it is an urgent way of taking relational accountability. The hypertextual nature of our digital environments is full of hidden lineages: sources, references and contextual cues that are often obscured by flat, linear design conventions. Experimental approaches such as Vanish Pointer reclaim these overlooked dimensions, rendering citation as a spatial, visual and navigable architecture, not just metadata. By reimagining interfaces as relational terrains, such tools encourage users to think critically about how knowledge is structured, traced and performed, transforming acts of reading, browsing and linking into moments of situated awareness.
In doing so, they foreground citational relationality — an understanding of citation as an active, situated practice that reveals the networks of dependency, influence and care underpinning digital knowledge, rather than as a static reference.
03.09.25