The Shape of Community: Michael Tidmus's HyperCard Projects and the Early AIDS Crisis

Visual AIDS Research Fellow Helena Shaskevich examines how artist Michael Tidmus (1951–2012) experimented with early digital media during the AIDS crisis, focusing on the pioneering HyperCard project The AIDS Stack (1987). Shaskevich considers how Tidmus used emerging computer networks to circulate information and imagine new forms of community, connection, and care.

Yet, what is equally striking about this historical moment is what remained conspicuously absent from public view. President Ronald Reagan officially opened the Games as the AIDS epidemic continued to surge. Three years had passed since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had first documented what was then known as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), yet Reagan would not publicly acknowledge AIDS until 1985 and would not propose a substantial federal response until 1987. According to estimates from the CDC, by the time of the 1984 opening ceremony, more than one hundred thirty thousand Americans had already contracted HIV.¹ The celebratory spectacle of the Olympics unfolded alongside a public health crisis that remained largely invisible within national narratives of progress. 

A hint of this political register is visible in the postcards. The series firmly centers queer desire and sexuality at the intersection of athleticism and nationalism. Camp comes for the athletic Olympic body. By infusing the iconography of Olympic sport with eroticism, Tidmus intervenes in a visual tradition that has long mobilized Classical male bodies in the service of conservative, often fascist, ideologies linking physical perfection to the strength of the nation state. 

The ironies of this nationalist narrative were evident to Tidmus, who—born and raised in Toronto—was still, by the early 1980s, a relative newcomer to Los Angeles and the United States more broadly. At the time, he worked primarily in printmaking, a medium whose capacity for bold graphic effects and iterative imagery aligned well with the Pop aesthetic that informed his practice, while also offering significant commercial applications. He became part of a small, loose network of queer artists, writers, and curators that included Tony Greene, Jeff Beall, and Herb Ritts, with whom he collaborated and exhibited into the early 1990s.

In 1984, Tidmus began to move away from painting and traditional printmaking to experiment with digital media, despite what he described as a profound sense of technophobic resistance. Tidmus recalled that it was his partner, John Olson, who “dragged” him “screaming and kicking into the future” when Olson insisted they purchase a computer to help manage the mundane logistics of their commercial greeting-card company.² With the charming dramatic flair that often animates his writing, Tidmus explained that his resistance to the purchase emerged from his “youthful involvement in anti-war pacifism, gay liberation politics, and a generalized fear of technology industries fueled by military-industrial billions.” He added, with characteristic coyness, “I was, after all, a sensitive artist.”³ However, he quickly discovered the computer’s potential for playful visuals—a sensibility that naturally extended his earlier graphic design practice. Reflecting on this transformation years later, Tidmus was careful to distinguish his work from the genre of “computer art,” insisting instead that the Macintosh was simply another tool in his artistic repertoire. At the same time, he acknowledged the seductive appeal of the personal computer’s democratizing promise. Its intuitive interface and increasingly available software enabled him to produce richly layered and visually complex imagery with unprecedented ease. Humorously recounting his gradual change of heart, Tidmus conceded that the computer was the “antithesis of the anti-democratic, depersonalizing, ‘techno-demon box-from-hell’ so fancifully delineated in my mind."⁴

Looking back on this transition, he likewise revealingly described 1984 as the year in which he began working almost exclusively with “cameras, computers, and networks.”⁵ While cameras and computers clearly function as artistic tools, his inclusion of “networks” highlights the artist’s broader conception of media. For Tidmus, “networks” were not mere technological infrastructures, but rather referred equally to social formations organized around care, communication, and community. This dual understanding of the network—as subject and form—became central to his artistic practice. 

As Tidmus began working with the computer, he also became increasingly involved with AIDS activism. This engagement precipitated a crucial shift in his work. Leaving behind the playful camp and Pop sensibilities of his early projects, he turned instead to a symbolic vocabulary drawn from apocalyptic Christian discourse—a visual language weaponized by the ascendant evangelical right in its attacks on the queer community. Rather than rejecting this rhetoric outright, Tidmus appropriated and transformed its iconography, exposing the unstable boundaries between sacral mortification and a more fleshly erotics.

In 1987, these religiously coded images came into alignment with Tidmus’s thinking about networks and communities. Using Apple’s newly released HyperCard software, Tidmus created two computer-based projects about AIDS: The AIDS Stack (1987) and Health and Morality: A Desultory Discourse (1988). Together, these works reveal Tidmus’s latent desire for a computational framework of care in the years just prior to the connectivity of the internet.

Now obsolete, HyperCard allowed users to construct stacks of interconnected virtual cards, containing text, graphics, and interactive elements. Developed by Bill Atkinson as part of Apple’s effort to make computing accessible to a wider public, HyperCard introduced many users to hypermedia and anticipated forms of navigation, such as interactive multimedia and menu-driven interfaces, that later became commonplace on the World Wide Web. 

Later that year, Tidmus created another HyperCard project titled Health and Morality: A Desultory Discourse, which was shown in the infamous 1989 LACE exhibition Against Nature, curated by novelist Dennis Cooper and artist Richard Hawkins. For the exhibition, Tidmus  returned to themes of apocalypse, religious fervor, salvation, and death. While The AIDS Stack tackles the preservation and distribution of information, Health and Morality more explicitly engages the contemporaneous political iconography that lay at the center of the ideological battles over AIDS. Beginning with a quotation from Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, the piece weaves together critiques of “modern medicine and the greed of pharmaceutical corporations with the hysterical ranting of fundamentalist religious leaders and conservative politicians” before culminating in an indictment of the Reagan administration’s response to AIDS.⁸ Throughout, the work’s structure places the body—as both statistical data point and physical presence—in tension with the viewer’s navigation of the interface. As viewers click through the stacks, epidemiological numbers on infection and transmission are juxtaposed with images of wasted and severely emaciated bodies, collapsing the abstraction of statistics into the visceral realities of death within the queer community.

Tidmus’s own later life remains largely undocumented. In a letter in Visual AIDS’s archives, he described the years between 1994 and 2006 as a “blank” period, due to HIV-related health complications. He lived in Amsterdam for a time. When forced, unexpectedly, to return to the United States, Tidmus left his personal archives in the care of a former partner. Those papers are now lost to time. Returning to California in 2004, the artist resumed a collage-based practice. In 2012, he died in his San Diego apartment at the age of sixty. 

Tidmus’s brief period of experimentation with HyperCard software insisted on the inseparability of information aesthetics and information politics. On the one hand, his works reimagine physically clunky, flat-file databases as elegant digital modules of community building—an elegy to a moment when data was becoming beautiful, increasingly seamless and user-friendly. On the other hand, Tidmus’s work insists on embodied corporeality within these emerging informational paradigms, and, most importantly, in the face of Reagan’s refusal to respond to the AIDS crisis despite the mounting fatalities and epidemiological evidence. Central to these questions is the way in which Tidmus’s HyperCard projects conceptualize and design the interface as an interactive form in which textual connections proliferate and gradually cohere into a network—a community in the process of becoming. 

This commitment is further crystallized in the ways in which Tidmus reimagined virality as a distribution politics for digital media, and a formal framework of communal care. Made just prior to the widespread use of the World Wide Web, the HyperCard projects were distributed freely through BITNET LISTSERV lists and computer bulletin board services, including the WELL, the Washington University Public Domain Archives, and Usenet. 

Tidmus’s interest in informational distribution and networked community-building, made evident in the HyperCard projects, persisted in his practice and deeply influenced his engagements with AIDS activism and tele-communities. Inspired by his participation in the Seropositive Ball, Tidmus became involved in initiatives such as ArtAIDS Link, marking his transition toward web art and net-based practices that remained committed to informational activism as a fundamental response to the AIDS crisis. At a historic moment when physical touch and proximity were stigmatized, when an HIV-positive status could exclude individuals from public spaces or prevent them from crossing international borders, Tidmus’s work envisioned the possibilities of a digitally mediated infrastructure of connection and care.

About the Author

Helena Shaskevich is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at Kennesaw State University, with a specialization in experimental media art from the 1960s to the present. Her scholarly writing has been published in numerous journals, including Feminist Media Histories, Camera Obscura, Art Journal, Woman’s Art Journal, Millennium Film Journal, and Afterimage, among others. Her short-form writing can be found in the Brooklyn Rail, Burlington Contemporary, and Burnaway.

This essay was edited by Nicole Kaack.