THE ART OF THE HYPERESSAY

"To me literature is the great ideal here, not some engineer's notion of information retrieval. The engineers seem to have the notion that you can take the documents that are written and dip them in some sort of technical acid and the facts will fall to the bottom and then these facts will roll into their appropriate slots. This is not so. Writing is the way it is because every word generally has some kind of meaning. It's finding these meanings and making them most useful to me that seems the great problem. So the issue is what will be the extension of literature into the great realm of interactive, multidimensional, many threaded presentational forms."
Ted Nelson
From the Memex to Xanadu to the World Wide Web to infinity and beyond, the history of technical innovation and information science is interwoven with the need for meaningful form and the mining of data for meaning. Everyday, immeasurable bytes of stuff are added to the universal library of the Internet. The following hyperessays are a literate and visual meander--one person's point(s) of view--about a particular topic, presented in a form that is intended to be as engrossing to experience as the ideas it manifests.

Carl Francis DiSalvo
Space Beyond Meaning, November 1998
with artwork by Patrick Maun
This hyperessay written and designed by DiSalvo was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to accompany the Space exhibition for The Shock of the View: Audiences, Artists, and Museums in the Digital Age, an online salon featuring a series of online exhibitions and related discussions.

Julie Luckenbach and Louis Mazza
Beuys/Logos, September 1997
This hyperessay, written by Luckenbach and designed by Mazza, accompanies the Walker exhibition Joseph Beuys: Multiples and "exforms" Beuys' life, art, and ideas through several sections: biography, acoustics, material as metaphor, art and life, silence, language/communication, philosophical influences, chalkboards, continuance, and resources. The site won the first annual Web 100 Award from the American Center for Design in 1998.

Laura Trippi
Drawing oN Air (dn/a), 1996
While not commissioned by the Walker, Trippi's first two "thematic webs," Engaging Infratructure and The Space of Information, are exemplary hyperessays that were hosted on äda'web, now part of the Walker's Digital Arts Study Collection.

"Drawing oN Air (dn/a) links trends in art and exhibitions toward open, participatory systems to the evolving architecture of the Internet. Based in a Web site, dn/a produces spatially dispersed "thematic webs" connecting creative practice to works of criticism, science, and popular culture."
Laura Trippi

Steve Dietz
Director of New Media Initiatives


Links

Mark Amerika
Network Installations, Creative Exhibitionism and Virtual Republishing
altx.com/ds/pages/amerika.html

John Barger
HyperTerrorist's Timeline of Hypertext History
www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/net/timeline.html

Tim Berners-Lee
www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Vannevar Bush
As We May Think
www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/bush/

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Kubla Khan or, a Vision In a Dream: A Fragment (1816)
www.yoga.com/raw/readings/coleridge.html

Michael Joyce
iberia.vassar.edu/~mijoyce/

George P. Landow
Homepage
www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/cv/gplbio.html

Stuart Moulthrop
Homepage (7 versions!)
raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop

Ted Nelson

  • Homepage
    www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/
  • The Future of Information
    www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/INFUTscans/INFUT_ExplPage.html

    Jim Whitehead
    Orality and Hypertext: An Interview with Ted Nelson
    www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html

    Gary Wolf
    The Curse of Xanadu
    www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html
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