Ancient Web: Hollywood Tarot Made Celebrities Into Arcana
Melanie Bacon's 1998–1999 Hollywood Tarot remapped tarot archetypes onto actors and television characters, with handmade card indexes, online readings, and late-nineties web humor.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
A tarot deck containing both Robin Williams as Mork and Patrick Stewart as the Emperor is not trying particularly hard to pass for an ancient oracle.
Melanie Bacon's Hollywood Tarot is a preserved 1998–1999 Web project that recasts the tarot's traditional archetypes as movie stars, characters, and celebrities. Its opening warning jokes that serious students of divination should go somewhere else. This is a satirical reading of Hollywood's public personas, not evidence that tarot predicts anything.
The site explains its approach in terms of typecasting. A performer can have a familiar fictional identity and a separate tabloid identity; Bacon chooses whichever seems most strongly associated with a given card. The essay is gloriously late-nineties in its examples and in its willingness to treat celebrity culture as a system of shared mythology.
Who gets to be the Fool?
The complete card index is the main attraction. Robin Williams as Mork is the Fool; Sigourney Weaver as Ripley becomes Strength; Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully stands for Justice; and Darth Vader, played by James Earl Jones, is the Devil. Lower cards bring in everyone from Elvis Presley to Barney the dinosaur.
The combinations are sometimes kind, sometimes mean, and always more revealing of their period than a generic digital tarot generator would be.
Visitors can also ask a question and choose among a ten-card spread, three-card spread, or the aptly named one-card 'sound byte'. Two comic interpreters, Lady Esmene and Madame Esmeralda, supply contrasting attitudes.
Its historical importance is documented right on the page. Bacon identifies her work as written during 1998–1999 and names the software and Web services used in making it, including Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Dogpile, Angelfire, and Webring. A guestbook powered by Beseen.com sits in the surrounding navigation. These details put the project inside the actual machinery of the old personal Web.
Bacon also says the celebrity images were gathered without permission from other websites. Their appearance in a surviving art project should not be mistaken for clearance to republish them.
Hollywood Tarot is an excellent reminder that Web experiments once came packaged as complete personal worlds, down to the disclaimers, jokes, and free guestbook.
Explore the deck's card list and try the original reading layouts.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #ancientweb, #webhistory, #webart, #popculture, #tarot