hypermedia - a montage of connected events

"The personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." – Marshall McLuhan

are they a global encyclopaedia or a graphic and animated on-line experience? Or all of these? and what is, or are, multi-media then?

Starting with the last - very briefly - multimedia refers to a multitude of media. Different media all packaged into the same parcel, but separate. Inevitably so, however closely the artist may have got to a full integration, they remain separate as each exists on a different platform with its own format. Now, integrated by the digital gods of binary, 'multimedia' can fuse and interconnect as 'hypermedia'.

"Hypermedia is a hybrid medium (sic) that has grown our of a very wide range of parallel developments in fields as diverse as art, film, tv, telecommunications and computer science .." (Hypermedia 2000)

plus ideas of montage and development of lateral thinking and the emergence of electric technology as extension of the central nervous system .. ( se McLuhan for that one ..)

innovations often developed by artists seizing upon and grappling with new media and technologies (morse,cubists, dada and print art, Laurie anderson, lots of multi-media artists from 70s to this day, Nam Jun Paik ....... )(Hypermedia 2000 p 24 - quoting John Berger on cubists and even Tom Philips' Humument as a kind of analogue hypertext)

From blurb on FACT's 'Nothing Special' exhibition dec/jan 03/4
"By 1975, TV was fifty years old and artists such as Warhol, Nam June Paik and Ant Farm were recognising the medium's inherent contradiction: as TV began to dominate our experience of the world, so mediated reality (however banal) became more desirable - more real - than everyday life." (Link to FACT )

WEB AS ART or as catalogue (information) or shopping mall.

Jake Tilson's The Cooker: interesting use of frames and artist design of web specific work -- blank spaces filled on click -- now into .css and presumably might move away from frames. eclectic mix, labyrinthine rather than organised - you need to be ready to be lost in it.

what we are up against:
The issue is that for many visitors the screen is not a place of meditation, so they want to be away from it rather than allowing themselves to get lost in its virtual spaces. Do we wait for them, do we create for those that are happy to go along with it -- or do we take our media arts into the realm of TV and performance spaces where they have learned to take some time to take in our offers ....

link to DABS (yuk) and camerafinder - which at least has a database link. You put in your desires, and only those that fit are offered to you ....

Towards a liminal Cyberspace:

liminal -- the threshold of change.

Liminal - that moment of becoming when old realities give way to new perspectives.

li·men (lmn) n. pl. li·mens or lim·i·na (lm-n) The threshold of a physiological or psychological response. [Latin lmen, threshold.] limi·nal (lm-nl) adj. (www.dictionary.com)

passage rite: any of numerous ceremonial events, existing in all historically known societies, that mark the passage of an individual from one social or religious status to another. Many of the most important and common rites are connected with the biological stages of life-birth, maturity, reproduction ……

you're either on the bus or off the bus -- or stepping in between. You can read more about this, with reference top theatre for Development in 'The Road to PPP' (backbone pages/crossing the border)

Only now are we really getting into McLuhan's global village - and only now does the world grab onto the idea of globalisation for better or for worse. It comes just as we are about to make the same mistake again and the neo liberal forces of globalisation steer us away from a truly global village. You're either on the bus or off the bus and it suits the powers to have most of the world looking at the bus through a cloud of dust.

The web is alive - it breathes and we are constantly re-forming it.
It is a social art and we are the artists.

By its very nature hypermedia tends towards an open source mentality. All the forces of gain and profit have pitted themselves against the basic reality. People who record music off tech radio or internet are pirates, people who cannot afford the bloated prices of today's software either just download it for free - or turn to Linux and the growing open access fora. The government of Thailand (if I am not mistaken) have declared the country a LINUX zone. IBM has embraced it and all of Google is built upon it.

The hackers are not all criminals, some are visionary yippies pointing the way. The web has always depended on hacking - when ther eis not a way, you hack one out of the coal face. And necessity has always been the mother of invention.

Small may well be beautiful, but the world is shrinking and that may be what McLuhan meant when he foresaw the global village, where our very central nervous system is an extension of electr[on]ic circuitry, giving us eyes and ears wherever there are TV, cameras, recorders and screens. Once we are surrounded by Teilhard de Chardin's 'noosphere' or membrane of thought we may find ourselves closer than we have ever been to our distant fellows.

The difference is one of perception. While we think to build our world mechanically ( the medium of the outgoing era) we try to build it brick by brick. And the small brick is indeed the beautiful basic ingredient. But that is retrothink. McLuhan speak But once we relinquish our adherence to Gutenberg's heritage of individualism we become a single organism link like Eugene Marais' soulful ants. Small in the universe and working together in our own noosphere of shared knowledge.

So we need to usher in the digital age by including all of the members of our shrinking world. We must all be on the bus. And once on the bus perceptions will change, ways of doing it will change. Which parent is not aware of the uncanny facility of their children with computers or at least computer and screen based games? Enter the space, accept it, and things begin to change. Rushkoff's Screenagers. There's something happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, mr Jones?

Characteristics of web and hypermedia

and is the web automatically a hypermedium?

truly interactive (? potentially at least - the vision is there)
holding form for multi-media events
uses the same technology to view as it does to create
thus universally available - promotes open access and open source
it's a medium of communication - both ways - which means dialaogue
promotes the "sea of shared knowledge" and on-line experience on a global scale
brings disparate diaspora into virtual contact - creating virtual communities and alliances
essentially non-linear in form
information source and medium
games are as significant an application of hypermedia as the exchange of information and ideas

Unlike the publishing industry, the games industry has been born out of the marriage of media and has developed a specific identity and even aesthetic of its own as a computer based medium.

As you know the movie of the book is not always as good - unless the director takes the material and finds its filmic strengths, likewise a big screen movie is diminished on the TV - each medium can borrow from its parent form, but needs to define itself again.

If hypermedia in general are to hold their own then they must evolve a unique identity, they must be able to offer an experience that is distinct from other media, whether taken separately or galleried together as with many Shockwave constructions. It is not potentially at least, the baby brother of Director. It has the potential to be live, rather than mechanically interactive. .

Today the Simms and other computer games have already ventured into that random, open country. Now other artists, researchers, academics, policy makers, ordinary people should begin to rush in where the gamesters already trod. And our kids are educating us.

Full interactivity implies that the outcome of dialogues and responses have not yet been imagined by the authors, that we are back in the land of John Cage and random art based on chance and improvisation. Work is created together, then the world has ownership of the piece, the world creates the knowledge. It is an organically shifting organism.

In the past books had the taste of authority. Historians told us how it was. Politicians tell us how it is. And we know that it is lies. Goethe asserted that "only EVERYONE can know the truth". But when he said that it was a unique vision of his own; now that truth can be shared and shaped by every member of Teilhard de Chardin's 'noosphere', McLuhan's global village, and the local housing estate.

Hypermedia are flexible, responsive and co-intentional. Statements are taken as offers and are not gospel.No longer do we believe everythingthat has appeared (published) in print. And that's not only cos of the lies of the politicians. the net has made us flexible.

and the statements of all are available to all. Bloggers know that. And search engines are not snobbish. Search engines are likely to find Joe's blog about mr blair, just as the world picked up on Salam Pax, the blogger from Baghdad (and now it's going backwards into a more lucrative book format!), or John Lee Perry's attack on the bush administration.

And the shoppers? Yes the shoppers also have begun to exploit the web, but their wares are already available. Their hypermedia are based on databases already populated with wares, and their researchers are only looking for new ideas to be consumed in the future. Their community exists, but it is closer to being the enemy in this discourse, so we will leave it aside for the moment.

So is it a catalogue of facts and information or is it a graphic and animated on-line experience?

WE need to consolidate its identity, by doing it, using and sharing our outcomes - by putting them on the web .... it should be self perpetuating!

The ingredients:

Until recently if you talked of multi-media, you would think of performance events - be it dance, theatre or rock and roll.

Pink Floyd extravaganzas blasting into the night sky.

Some, like Laurie Anderson, keep that tradition going. We should not forget that the domain is not the screen alone. As a mutually affective matrix, it doesn't have to concentrate on the screen. The screen may be one part of an event. the mouse is where it's at. Who moves the mouse and what form does it take? Let an audience have control of the mouse and you have interactive live hypermedia - linking to real and virtually real events.

As the novelty of hypermedia wears off so our montages will need to be better. Better designed, easier to use, more of an on-line experience providing both information and satisfaction on several levels. In the case of a game, that may be clear, in the case of a news service, that too is clear.

In the case of a community web-site, for example, the levels of satisfaction may be many. But that variety may be the essential element to keep them coming once they have found out what they wanted to know.