images . words . links . contact
joseph squier
Life with Father is an autobiographical web-based artwork created by Joseph Squier and published in 1994 as part of his pioneering digital project the place. As one of the earliest works of electronic literature and net art to explore intimate personal narrative through the web, Life with Father holds a foundational place in the history of digital storytelling. It is a deeply personal, formally experimental, and technologically innovative work that uses the nonlinear architecture of the internet to reflect on memory, identity, gender, and familial relationships.
In Life with Father, Squier constructs a fragmented portrait of his father through a sequence of hyperlinked images and texts. The piece weaves together childhood recollections, quiet domestic moments, philosophical reflections, and unresolved emotional tensions. At its heart is an exploration of what it means to remember someone who has shaped us profoundly—what it means to love, to mourn, and to interpret across time.
The father in the work is not presented as a fixed figure, but as a shifting presence—part ghost, part guide, part enigma. It is also a meditation on gender: on the inherited lessons of manhood, emotional distance, and the normalized ideals of toughness, detachment, and male violence that shape identity from an early age. Squier’s work questions these constructions and the damage they can inflict, not only within families but within the self.
The strength of Life with Father lies in how it leverages the unique capabilities of digital media to evoke emotional nuance. Instead of attempting to replicate print-based storytelling, Squier embraces the web’s fluidity — its capacity for layering, interruption, and echo. The hyperlinks are not just functional; they are metaphoric — each link representing a leap in thought, a shift in feeling, a resurfacing of memory. The result is a piece that is immersive, elastic, and emotionally resonant.
Visually, the work is marked by a restrained, grayscale and duotone palette that draws from Squier’s background in photography. The images — grainy, atmospheric, and often enigmatic — are paired with minimal but poetic text.
Technically, Life With Father was built using early web tools, HTML 1.0 with basic scripting. This adds to its significance as a pioneering digital work. In a period when web browsers were still in their infancy and bandwidth was limited, Squier’s ability to craft an immersive emotional landscape demonstrates both ingenuity and restraint. Rather than overwhelm the viewer with interactivity or spectacle, the work offers a quiet space for contemplation — one that invites users to pause, reflect, and return.
Contextually, the piece is situated within the broader framework of the place, which itself was among the first digital environments designed explicitly as an artwork. Whereas the place addresses themes of urban memory, digital geography, and identity in flux, Life With Father narrows the lens, turning inward to examine the microcosm of familial memory and emotional inheritance. In doing so, it provides a powerful counterpoint to the broader abstractions of the larger project.
Life With Father has been recognized as a landmark in net art and electronic literature. It has been referenced in academic discussions of early digital poetics and featured in museum collections and archives dedicated to preserving the history of web-based art. Its impact lies not only in its content but in its form — in how it opened a path for personal, emotionally resonant storytelling in a medium that was then still largely seen as technical or impersonal.
Squier’s use of digital space as an emotional and narrative terrain was ahead of its time. Life With Father anticipated many of the techniques now common in digital storytelling, from fragmented narrative structures to ambient interactivity. More importantly, it affirmed that the web could serve as a vessel for intimate expression — that it could hold the weight of memory, loss, and reflection with grace.
What is particularly striking about the piece is how it manages to make the user complicit in the act of remembering. As the viewer clicks through the segments, they become not just a reader or a viewer, but a participant — assembling a father from pieces, as anyone might do when looking back across decades. The work does not provide answers. It offers presence. It does not conclude; it circulates, loops, resonates.
Today, as digital media continues to evolve and new platforms emerge, Life With Father stands as a reminder of the web’s poetic potential. It invites viewers not only to engage with a story but to experience a way of remembering — tentative, recursive, unresolved. It reminds us that digital art, at its best, does not simply illustrate life but inhabits it, turning pixels into echoes, links into questions, and silence into presence.
As both an artwork and an act of digital remembrance, Life With Father remains one of Joseph Squier’s most poignant and enduring contributions. It is a testament to the power of restraint, the depth of feeling, and the unique expressive capabilities of the web as a poetic medium. The piece has aged not as a relic, but as a resonant, still-vital experience — one that continues to speak to those navigating their own histories, losses, and inheritances in a digitized world.
(coming soon: link to 1998 version of the place)