Hyper Hypertext
Network Designer Tim Berners-Lee
The answer, of course, was hypertext. Sure the Net functioned fine and was becoming increasingly popular just on the strength and utility of being able to transfer information and text-chat in real time, but it was the introduction of the World Wide Web with Mosaic and, slightly later, the Netscape browser which fundamentally changed public perception of the Internet and attracted huge numbers to it.
And what was it about these browsers which was so different from what had come before?
Well, of course, it was several things; we have already seen that the ease of installation and set up was very important in attracting people who didn't have a degree in computer science. The browser's ability to simultaneously display several types of formatted information was crucial -- the aesthetics of Net applications up to that time had been, to put put it kindly, utilitarian. Graphical point-and-click browsers allowed for a greater design element and, in a media-saturated world, people expect stuff to be pretty.
But most importantly, and at the heart of that point and click interface, was hypertext. It was 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee posted the first computer code which enabled hypertextual authoring to a UseNet discussion group, but hypertext was something which had been explicitly conceived of and actively debated and theorised for over forty years. Now just about everything we see on-line, right down to our email, is hypertext, but it was this earlier theoretical work which has really shaped hypertextual practices and in doing so our experience of the Web.
Vannever Bush is credited with first speculating in print about hypertext, although he did not use the term and two decades would pass before anyone else did. In the July, 1945, issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine, Bush set down the fundamental concepts of what would become known as hypertext in an article called "As We May Think." What troubled Bush was the discrepancy between humanity's mushrooming storehouse of knowledge and our inadequate tools for accessing that knowledge. "The means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item," he wrote, "is the same as it was used in the days of square-rigged ships." Bush began by looking at how the mind worked, observing that it "operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts." An information retrieval system, he reasoned, should display a similar profile, being freely able to link associated subjects. His solution, pictured below, was called 'memex'.
hypertext = 'non-sequential writing'
?
"In
order for the experience of hypertext's non-sequential, multiple linkings
of information to be understood as such,it needs to be conceptualized
as a referent within a particular order of discourse, which differentiates
this specific experience of textuality from every other type of writing"
Darren Tofts, Memory Trade, p. 27
In his book 'Literary Machines' Nelson described hypertext as 'non-sequential writing' and then attempted to demonstrate its possibilities through the format of his book which includes seven chapters '1' and another seven chapters '3', several conclusions and no page numbers. In his introductory "Plan of this book" Nelson suggests how the book should be read:
What is crucial about Nelson's model is that it positions interactive computing as essentially text-based and literary. And it is the model of the written document which has become the defining paradigm of the Web -- we have web 'pages' not spaces or vectors, hypertext rather than hypersound or hypermovement. Of course this has changed somewhat over recent years with the introduction of VRML and enhanced multimedia possibilities, but 99.99999% of all stuff on the Web still takes the form of written documents most of which are presented within the established print formats such as brochure, press release, essay, magazine article, diary or indexed directory."It is suggested that you read Chapter Zero first; and then any of the introductory Chapters One; and then Chapter two, which is the heart of the book... You may or may not feel that you understand it fully. It is suggested that you then read one of the closing chapters. This will help you see what the future of the system is supposed to be about. At this point it is suggested that you read another of the introductory Chapters One, and look over Chapter two again. You will almost certainly understand it better. Continue in this vein, passing repeatedly through Chapter Two, until you understand the book."
Nicholas Negroponte, usually a booster for all things digital, in his justification for committing his thoughts on our digital future to a published book, has written:
"Interactive multimedia leaves very little to the imagination. Like a Hollywood film, multimedia narratives include such specific representations that less and less is left to the minds eye. ...When you read a novel, much of the colour, sound and motion comes from you."
Well, DUH! Perhaps he would have been better to just admit that it a whole lot easier to make bucks out of books than it is to sell electronic content...(on the other hand, I'd like to know what interactive narratives he's been using and where I can get them too...)
Dissimulations, Andy Cameron
Picture of Malthroup, Joyce,
Kaplan and McDaid
At its most basic, what is increasingly being called 'traditional hypertext' -- the works of people like Stuart Malthrop, Michael Joyce and Nancy Kaplan -- in which hypertext describes a new literary genre which is basically 'choose your own adventure' with pretensions.
This kind of hypertext, what most theorists mean when they use the term 'hypertext', takes as its literary touchstone Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths". Borges imagines a novel in which the path of the story splits, where all things are conceivable, and all things take place. The author of this story within a story is judged insane and commits suicide, and Borges' narrator is arrested and condemned to death - thus, perhaps, prefiguring the fate of the narrator and of the author in the interactive era. It is the either/or of the garden paths which provide the essential visualisation of these hypertexts; the dice from the 'choose your own adventure' is replaced by the uncertainty of just what outcome choosing one link over another, taking one path rather than another, will lead to.
see also Hegirascope
Salman
Rushdie, in his 1995 novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, describes
how the wicked Chupwalas from the land of Chup go to great efforts to
poison and destroy the gloriously rich Sea of Stories from which all
the world's tales and yarns miraculously spring. They do this by pouring
in anti-stories, shadow-tales which turn love stories into tales of
hate, tragedies in comedic farces, action dramas into slow moving dirges
and so on. Many would say that the Chupwalas' efforts to destroy the
Sea of Stories is quite similar to the work of contemporary interactive
writers as they poison traditional forms of storytelling by adding abominable
interactions in what are often labyrinthine narrative disasters.
Interactive
Narrative Crashing into the Sea of Stories
Literary Hypertext; the passing of the golden age, Robert Coover
Reading Victory Gardens. it is not hard to see why writing a gripping bit of hypertext fiction is so hard. To write not simply an account of what happened but a whole series of 'what-ifs' increases both the volume and complexity of an author's task exponentially. This generation, the old guys really, tend to eschew fancy graphics or multimedia components, indeed many are fiercely opposed to such fripperies, arguing that they distract the 'user' [for want of a less leading word] from the text.
Or maybe they just want time to concentrate on the writing. Making even basic hypertext requires a suite of skills alongside the ability to churn out huge quantities of equally interesting chunks of words. This involves, even at the most 'rudimentary' level, learning to become your own typesetter/designer/illustrator either in a proprietary programs like Storyspace and Photoshop, and/or by learning HTML. In addition, it's just as important to know enough about audience psychology, information architecture and navigational strategies to make it compelling enough, and simple enough, to want to stay around. None of these skills are typical of the writer or academic of the past.
Small wonder then, that these writers don't want to take on the added burden of learning graphic design and typography, JavaScript and CGI, image and sound capture and manipulation and so on. Indeed, some of them seem to positively revile the added possibilities that current technologies strive so hard to market. Robert Coover recently wrote:"Interactivity implies forking paths and each pathway must be written and fitted together. The greater the number of pathways, the greater the sense of textual play for the reader, and the greater the amount of work for the writer. The volume of story web increases exponentially with additional points of interaction. An author is faced with an inevitable and depressing tradeoff - sacrificing time spent on the texture of the narrative, its literary or cinematic qualities, for an enhanced interactive complexity. The result can be interactive but schematic, resembling the outline of a story rather than the story itself"
Dissimulations, Andy Cameron
Perhaps nothing is ever as good as it used to be..."with the emergence of the World Wide Web, something new is happening. For those who've only recently lost their footing and fallen into the flood of hypertext, literary or otherwise, it may be dismaying to learn that they are arriving after the golden age is already over, but that's in the nature of golden ages: not even there until so seen by succeeding generations."
Literary Hypertext; the passing of the golden age, Robert Coover
Perhaps the most effective demonstration of the power of a combination of branching and rhizomatic structures linking descriptions of thematic places to generate narrative is to be found in MUDs -- the Multi-user Dimensions which translated the cerebral and social virtual realities of 'Dungeons and Dragons' into digital space. These communal works of fiction, created from moment to moment by participants acting within a complex network of descriptive places in them, perhaps most closely approach David Jay Bolter's alternative definition of hypertext as writing with places -- 'topoi' [also the root of the English word 'topic'].
Some hypertextas have used this notion as a literal structuring metaphor to organise their content and help users orienteer around it. In Trip Matthew Miller uses the American highway system as a navigational tool for the documentation of a cross-country trip. The main interface is a map of the US, and the highway metaphor proves to be extremely effective: it provides you with spatial orientation, even if you seem to have lost the route of the story-line.
Other hypertext writers have tried to get over the difficulties by exploiting the nonlinear nature of links by producing non-narratival texts. These texts tend to be one of two types;
1• impressionistic, with each hypertext chunk attempting to be independently perfect, with only a loose relationship to other chunks. Look at, for example, is Cathy Marshall and Judy Malloy's work: Forward Anywhere
2• kaleidoscopic: this involves grouping hypertext chunks around the one theme but each of which come at it from a different angle. This tends to be a tactic particularly favoured by the more theoretically inclined and nonfiction hypertext writers writers.
Adelaide-based hypertextistes, Linda Carroli and Josephine Wilson, use this strategy in their poetic water always writes in the pluralAnd in relation to nonfiction -- Larry Wendt's site Narrative as Genealogy: Sound Sense in an Era of Hypertext. Wendt has suggested that people need to think about hypertext differently; to stop thinking of it as souped-up print and to explore other possibilities both historical and contemporary, He writes in Hypertext Culture:
"Our vestigial and amputated orality flops around like a paraplegic in attempting to expressed an anti-narrative. It haunts our dreams. It lurks within the structures of our myths. It is expansive, delusional, and self-articulating in ways that traditional narrative is linear, compact and succinct. It is a genealogy with a lot of pieces left out. With these fragments are endless redundancies within redundancies that leads to more redundancies. This is what 'channel surfing' and hypertext aspires to be. It is the mechanism of collage: the text, the movie and the video cut-up. It slices, dices, and sweeps the floor clean. It refines details with ever increasing speed, until they squeal."
Mixed Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture Ellen Lupton
Link to visual text site
"..spatial/visual
arts are characterized by the simultaneity of signs (color), while the
temporal/verbal arts are characterized by the succession of signs (language).
So with this historic, if somewhat unstable, distinction we ask: what
does it mean for words to approach the condition of visuality? Put another
way, what is the consequence of poetry, poesis, functioning ut pictura,
as a painting does?"
UT
Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word
John Tolva
Not My Type
The Illustrated Alphabet
An animation of Life SpaciesII
"[Hypertext]
is the banished body. Its compositional principle is desire. It gives
a loudspeaker to the knee, a hearing trumpet to the elbow: Hypertext is
the body languorously extending itself to its own limits, hemmed in only
by its own lack of extent."
Shelly Jackson
Literary
Hypertext; the passing of the golden age, Robert
Coover
Perhaps the most persuasive, and confronting, hyper-palimpsest is jodi.org -- an excessive and mutating palimpsest of forgotten code, new Java and old mistakes...
"We are honored to be in somebody's computer" proclaim Jodi authors Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans who have not just gone beyond the interface, they have abolished it. Jodi pages flash and burn, scrolling and displaying uncontrollable computer code, fragmented shards of interface elements (menus, buttons, etc...), code stripped bare of its functionality, a once symbolic language now transformed into a theater of the absurd. Jodi forces us to question the representation of data, its translation, its mapping, its conventional application for visualizing and decoding the language of programming into metaphors and signs we can interpret and utilize.
What both of these examples (auslander, jodi) do is play with and between the difference between text and image. In is in this interstice, I believe, that we can look to for the birth of a form more native to the hybrid and excessive nature of the net. Many writers have pointed out the bleeding obvious; all writing, even standardised press type, is visual. Context is content. Even the vanilla 'brutal functionalism' of the hypertext classicists encodes meaning in the aesthetics of its presentation.
Advertising has long recognised this fact:
Some non-digital examples of literally making writing visible or spatial include calligraphy, pictograms, concrete poetry, and rebus puzzles. These marginalized forms acknowledge the word as an image like anything else and so exploit the possibilities inherent in its physicality.
An on-line artwork -- if not a hypertext -- which playful exploits the graphic nature of letters is the Lycette's Flash animation, Not My Type. Also by the brothers Lycette, The Illustrated Alphabet, a shockwave work with limited interactivity but unlimited humour.
Herv? Graumann's l.o.s.t. literally makes visible the graphic and spatial components of type. Visitors are initially left in the dark, until their cursor becomes a torch lighting words.
TEXT.URE by Nam Szeto, Steve Cannon, and Jeffrey Piazza: Based on Java technology, TEXT.URE displays four interconnected panels of data: Texture, Altitude, History, and Text. The applet is built so that your interaction with the information in one panel affects the data that's displayed in the others. As you mouse over the terrain in the Texture panel, information is mapped to the Altitude and History panels, and a story begins to take shape in the Text panel. You - the user, observer - are left to decode the various systems based on cryptic, but compelling, visual cues. The artists intended to build a smooth, fluid interface to contrast with what they see as the staccato pace of surfing the Web. The artists extended their exploration into concepts of interaction - both between user and interface and among elements of the interface itself. Drawing inspiration from the geometric structures of painters like Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian and Russian constructivist Kasimir Malevich, the trio started by experimenting with the relationships between different visual spaces on the screen and only then added text and other elements.
VERBARIUM is an interactive text-to-form editor on the Internet by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. At the VERBARIUM?s web site, on-line user can choose to write text messages and each of these messages functions as a genetic code to create a visual three-dimensional form. A special text-to-form editor ensures the genetic encoding of text characters (=letters) into design functions. It provides constantly new images that are not any more pre-defined by the artist but instead develop in real-time through the interaction of the user with the system. Each different message creates a different form. Depending on the composition of the text, the forms can either be simple or complex, or abstract or organic. All text messages together are used to build a collective and complex three-dimensional image. This image is like a virtual herbarium, composed of the various forms based on the different text messages (i.e., verbs), hence the name VERBARIUM. On-line users do not only help to create and develop this virtual VERBARIUM, but also have the option of clicking any part within the collective image to retrieve messages sent earlier by other users.
"Life SpaciesII" literally turns text, and particularly Internet text, into a living thing. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneaus' artificial life environment allowed remotely located visitors via the Internet and on-site visitors to the installation at the ICC Museum in Tokyo to interact with each other through evolutionary forms and images. Through the "Life SpaciesII" web page, people all over the world interacted by simply typing and sending an email message to the "Life SpaciesII" web site, they could create their own artificial creature. S and M developed a special text-to-form coding system that enables them to use written text as genetic code and translate it into visual creatures. In a way similar to the genetic code in nature, letters, syntax and sequencing of the text is used to code certain parameters in the creature's design functions. Form, shape, color, texture and the number of bodies and limbs are influenced by the text parameters. As there is a great variation in the texts sent by different people, the creatures themselves also vary greatly in their appearance. As soon as a message is sent, the produced creature starts to live and move around in the "Life SpaciesII" environment. Depending on the complexity of the written text message the creatures body design and its ability to move is determined. Some creatures might move very fast whereas others might be slower. Creatures also look for food and aim to eat text characters that can be interactively released by the visitors: creatures always eat the same characters as contained in their genetic code. For example "John" creature will only eat "J", "o", "h" and "n". Since other creatures might want to eat the same characters as well, competition among creatures for certain types of food will occur. Creatures also might starve and die if they do not succeed to catch enough text characters. On the other hand if a creature has eaten enough food (=text characters) it will look for a mating partner and bear a child. Offspring creatures will then carry the genetic code of the parent creatures and live and interact with the other creatures in "Life SpaciesII." "Art as a Living Process" Based upon the insight that interaction per se and the interrelation between entities are the driving forces for the structures of life, we are investigating the interaction and creative process as such. Creation is not any more understood as expression of the artists inner creativity or "ingenium," but instead becomes itself an intrinsically dynamic process that is based upon the interaction parameters and the evolutionary image processes of the work.
And to the future... will it be as bleak as Coover sees it?
IN TERMS OF NEW SERIOUS LITERATURE, the Web has not been very hospitable. It tends to be a noisy, restless, opportunistic, superficial, e-commerce-driven, chaotic realm, dominated by hacks, pitchmen, and pretenders, in which the quiet voice of literature cannot easily be heard or, if heard by chance, attended to for more than a moment or two. Literature is meditative and the Net is riven by ceaseless hype and chatter. Literature has a shape, and the Net is shapeless. The discrete object is gone, there's only this vast disorderly sprawl, about as appealing as a scatter of old magazines on a table in the dentist's lounge. Literature is traditionally slow and low-tech and thoughtful, the Net is fast and high-tech and actional. As for hyperfiction, the old Golden Age webworks of text have largely vanished, and hypertext is now used more to access hypermedia as enhancements for more or less linear narratives -- when it's not launching the reader out into the mazy outer space of the World Wide Web, never to be seen again. Notions of architecture, mapping, design: mostly gone. Genuine interactivity, too; the reader is commonly obliged now to enter the media-rich but ineluctable flow as directed by the author or authors: In a sense, it's back to the movies again, that most passive and imperious of forms.
Proto-hypertexts
Raymond Queneau's One Hundred Trillion Poems
William Gillespie's 11,112,006,825,558,016 Sonnets
Mark Saports, 'Composition No. 1
Robert Coover's short story "Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl
Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing
Book sources
Darren Tofts, Memory Trade, 21*C Books, Sydney, 1998
rough hypertext. WHAT IS HYPERTEXT?, Charles Deemer, 1994
Updating (Electronic) Storytelling Franco Minganti Node9 1 (January 1997)
The Heresy of Hypertext: Fear and Anxiety in the Late Age of Print John Tolva
[Hypertext With Characters] Mark Bernstein Originally presented at the 1995 International Workshop On Hypermedia Design, Montpellier, France.
On-line
Store - Remember - Transfer: On the Archeology of (Hyper-) Text Memory Storage Techniques Heiko Idensen
Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print, Nancy Kaplan
Hpertext: The next generation, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Hypertext and Critical Theory, George Landow
TYPORALITY, Gabrielle Marks
Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print , Nancy Kaplan
Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star Nick Montfort
Bridging the Gulfs: From Hypertext to Cyberspace, Thierry Bardini
Digital Literature: From text to hypertext and beyond, Raine Koskimaa, 2000
Other hypertext works
"Last Entry: Bombay, 1st of July..." A travel log through time, space and identity, Andrea Zapp
Flame Wars, Judy Malloy
"Sunshine 69" takes visitors on a trip through the '60s, highlighting parallels between psychedelia and cyberdelia.
Grammatron -- Mark Amerika
A partial list literary andecedents that will eventually have links....
- Borges -- Labyrinths, Garden of Forking Paths, Library of Babel, Feunes the memorist
- James Joyce -- Finnigan's Wake, Ullyses
- Geoff Ryman, 256
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
- Raymond
Roussel -- 'New Impressions of Africa'
http://www.dmu.ac.uk/~ahu/nia/preface.html - Thomas Pynchon, 'Gravity's Rainbow'
- Choose your own Adventures
- Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
- Milorad Pavic, The Dictionary of the Khazars
- Padovik, Manuscript found at Saragossa
- Ian Watson, The Embedding
Artists
- Schwitters
- Joseph Cornell
- Hannah Hoch
- Robert Rauschenberg
- Colin McCahon
- Juan de Vila
- Gothic illuminated manuscripts
return to hypertext essays index :: return to main index
Shiralee Saul: Originally authored 2000, last updated February 2001
Hypertext is a reflection of the entropy that exists in the universe. We, the artists, try to create order, but at the same moment this adds to randomness for we continuously change the meaning, the form of our creation. As we create more randomness in structure, there is more order in our minds. Life appears hectic and chaotic to the observer; however, it is actually habitual and sane to the "artist," much like hypertext. . . .
From 'Mola Web'
IN TERMS OF NEW SERIOUS LITERATURE, the Web has not been very hospitable. It tends to be a noisy, restless, opportunistic, superficial, e-commerce-driven, chaotic realm, dominated by hacks, pitchmen, and pretenders, in which the quiet voice of literature cannot easily be heard or, if heard by chance, attended to for more than a moment or two. Literature is meditative and the Net is riven by ceaseless hype and chatter. Literature has a shape, and the Net is shapeless. The discrete object is gone, there's only this vast disorderly sprawl, about as appealing as a scatter of old magazines on a table in the dentist's lounge. Literature is traditionally slow and low-tech and thoughtful, the Net is fast and high-tech and actional. As for hyperfiction, the old Golden Age webworks of text have largely vanished, and hypertext is now used more to access hypermedia as enhancements for more or less linear narratives -- when it's not launching the reader out into the mazy outer space of the World Wide Web, never to be seen again. Notions of architecture, mapping, design: mostly gone. Genuine interactivity, too; the reader is commonly obliged now to enter the media-rich but ineluctable flow as directed by the author or authors: In a sense, it's back to the movies again, that most passive and imperious of forms.
Literary
Hypertext; the passing of the golden age, Robert Coover
Things to look at soon:
1• How does hypertext affect the reader -- does it produce a diffferent mode of reading?
Deleuze and Guattari suggest orienteering in the most accurate metaphor; that navigating, surveying and mapping unfamiliar and unstable terrain demands a conceptual shift from pages and chapters to flows and plateaux.
""...a
text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering
uinto mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is
one place that this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader"
Roland Barthes
The
basic function of writing is 'to assist the user in an act of recognition'
through the performance of ' a series of technological devices'.
Eric Havelock quoted p. 39 Tofts
see GAPS, MAPS AND PERCEPTION: WHAT HYPERTEXT READERS (DON'T) DO, J. Yellowlees Douglas
and Reading Hypertext, David S. Miall
2• The ambivalent, hybrid trope of the cyborg is the emblematic figure of this confusion of boundaries precipitated by information and communications systems.
Writing as the first 'cyborg technology' a device which augements human abilities -- ie memory.
Hypertext, she has said elsewhere, "is the banished body. Its compositional principle is desire. It gives a loudspeaker to the knee, a hearing trumpet to the elbow: Hypertext is the body languorously extending itself to its own limits, hemmed in only by its own lack of extent." The very choice of the central metaphor of Patchwork Girl was alone a stroke of genius:the patching together of a new body, whether of flesh or text, from linked fragments of other bodies, also of flesh, also of text, once dead, now given new life, new form, if somewhat strange and "monstrous." The work is divided, like the senses, into five linked sections, and one of these is the raiding of the graveyard for body parts -- and for the stories attached to their previous owners. Thus, from the outset, this patching together of a physical body from disparate but harmonious parts was linked to a similar patching together of story materials, the body becoming text, text body, a traditional theme given its true hypertextual configuration with this multiply coded, larger-than-life Patchwork Girl. "You could say that all bodies are written bodies," Jackson wrote, "all lives pieces of writing": in Coover.
Haraway's use of the cyborg metaphor -- an excessive, disperate, hetrogenous, bricolaged, and paradoxical interlocking of exclusive systems which yet work in symbiotic synthesis provides an alternative paradigm for understanding -- a system of relationships and relativities.
Artists: Shelly Jackson, 'Patchwork Girl', Linda Dement Cyberspace girlmonster
3• Chora.
The
Chora is neither male nor female, but third genders. It is the twisting,
turning, folding of cyberspace. It is multimedia. And it has a totally
new reconception of memory. The Chora is the impossible. CATTt can only
be a stand-in for this impossibility. Ulmer writes: "My problem, in inventing
an electronic rhetoric by replacing topos with chora in the practice of
invention, is to devise a 'discourse on method' for that which, similarly,
is the other of method" (66). The key in great part is the new concept
of memory. Ulmer explains that Chorography as a practice corresponds to
recent developments in computing such as "connectionism." Opposed to the
classical concept of memory as storing information in some specific locale
from which it may be retrieved, "connectionist designs of computer memory"
are not stored at any specific locus, but in the myriad relationships
among various loci
HEURETICS: The Logic of Invention Gregory L. Ulmer
As
he [Plato] refines his discourse in Timaeus, starting at "section 16,"
he feels the need to introduce a third term to do justice to his experience
of human affairs. After identifying this third distinct form, he immediately
realizes that this one form "is difficult and obscure to speak about in
general terms." He writes, "it is the receptacle and as it were, the nurse
of all becoming and change." Before naming this third term as "chora,"
he endeavors to define it in relation to our common understanding of the
world, matter and generation. First, we learn that this term is the stuff
of the world, that primordial element that constitutes both human and
nature, given that "the names fire, earth, water, air really indicate
differences of quality, not of substance," he says. So this notion of
chora is a prima-m_talia, a primordial substance, because the other elements
are only differences of qualities, not of substance... As everything in
the world is in the process of change, those four elemental substances
are, in the end, never stable. "We should speak of them not as 'things',"
Plato says, "but rather as qualities." Their receptacle, chora, is then
compared to a mass of neutral plastic material upon which differing impressions
are stamped. This prima materia has no definite character of its own and
yet is the ultimate reality of all things... Then he continues, "the same
argument applies to the natural receptacle of all bodies. It can always
be called the same because it never alters its characteristics. We may,
indeed, use the metaphor of birth, and compare the receptacle to the mother,
the model (that is to say, being) to the father and what they produce
between them to their offspring." Following from an ancient misconception
of genetics, Plato assumed that the mother was an appropriate metaphor
for this neutral receptacle because biological traits were believed in
classical Greece to be an exclusive attribute of the male semen. The issue
is that there is a connection between the head and the womb; this is actually
very crucial... Thus, Plato concludes that: there must be three components
to reality: first, the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible being,
imperceptible to decide all the other senses, which is the object of thought,
immutable being; second, that which bears the same name of the form it
resembles, but is sensible, has come into existence, is in constant motion,
and is apprehended by opinion with the aid of sensation, becoming (the
old relationship between the ideal chair and the specific chair which
you are sitting. The ideal chair is being, the specific chair is becoming);
and third, chora, which is eternal and indestructible, which provides
a position for everything that comes to be and which is apprehended without
the senses by a sort of superious reasoning and is so hard to believe
in. We look at it, indeed, in a kind of dream and say that everything
that exists must be somewhere and occupy some space and that what is nowhere
in heaven or earth is nothing at all. So it is a substance of dreams;
chora is the substance of dreams.
CHORA AS ARCHITECTURAL MEANING: The Space In-Between and Its Disappearance
in Instrumental Representation Dr. Alberto Perez-Gomez
Ulmer has, in fact, reinstated the mnemonic aspect of rhetoric...His work forms the basis of of an electronic rhetoric of invention, "concerned with the history opf 'place' in relation to memory." ...derives from term used by Plato in Timaeus which he portrays ... as the generative space between being and becoming... uses the image of a winnower threshing corn ... In hypermedia, place is a plateaux, a temporary stasis acheived while one is in transit between one node and another..p 71-72 Tofts
4• Objective correlative
The 'objective correlative' "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative', in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensiory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." TS Eliot On Hamlet 1919 p.26
"..spatial/visual
arts are characterized by the simultaneity of signs (color), while the
temporal/verbal arts are characterized by the succession of signs (language).
So with this historic, if somewhat unstable, distinction we ask: what
does it mean for words to approach the condition of visuality? Put another
way, what is the consequence of poetry, poesis, functioning ut pictura,
as a painting does?"
Ut
Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word
John Tolva
Art-as-we-know-it
is an emblem of [the] rights of modern subjecthood. In modernity, visual
culture does not embody the mysteries of myth and ritual conjured by powers
beyond humanity. It is not produced upon the command of the church or
crown. Its marker does not subscribe to the dictates of an academy run
by the state. Traditionally, great modern Art is made by one creator,
who is inspired to produce it. This kind of inspiration has been understood
as the rare gift of genius. Art functions as a demonstration of its maker's
freedom, and it exemplifies the modern subject's right to own something
and exchange it. A work of art has traditionally been seen as the artist's
absolute property, a surrogate for and realization of his or her essential
self. The artwork when exhibited and exchanged within the "free market"
acquires meaning and value.
Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing is Seeing, Creating the Culture of Art
1995 Penguin Books USA.
the
conventional equivalence of an individual letter wijth a single sound
(phonography), revolutionised writting by refining it as the direct representation
or transcription of speech... alphabetic writing was seen as providing
speech with an 'objective correlative', a material counterpart to oral
discourse.'
p. 48 Tofts
Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), the subject of a new critical biography by Mark Ford. Roussel, for reasons both pathological and artistic, wrote his works according to verbal procedures that at their simplest resemble the forced punning of cryptic crossword clues. But one linguistic twist can generate wildly bizarre narrative fugues, often in the form of exotic machines that Roussel describes with the fastidious logic of an industrial manual. Roussel's admirers among the Surrealists may have produced imagery as fanciful, but rarely as hypnotically compelling, because their ethic of total imaginative freedom could hardly envisage the lab-coated decorum of Roussel's style. Roussel's direct descendants were the writers of the OuLiPo, or Workshop for Potential Literature. Raymond Queneau wrote novels informed by mathematical formulae; Harry Mathews devised verbal "algorithms" as a way of kick-starting invention; most notoriously, Georges P?rec wrote La Disparition, a novel that dispenses entirely with the letter "e". This may seem a nerd algebrist's attitude to literature, rather than a writerly one. But the Oulipeans' masochistic adherence to formal bondage is a highly subversive gesture in the context of French literature, the history of which comprises a punitive repertoire of conventions.
Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique was published in 1932, together with 59 drawings by Henri-Achille Zo, painter and artist. Why these ornaments ? Until today, and in spite of desperate attempts to understand their use, their meaning has remained mysterious. At the end of 1996, Jacques Caumont started studying H-A Zo's illustrationsÑwhose " dryness due to pen-and-ink-drawing does not correspond to the abundance and commotion " of R. Roussel's linesÑas he would look at a Duchamp touched with " Beauty of indifference ". Today, CAUMONT-Champollion is ready to present the secret of Zo-Roussel's 59 drawings. Two homophonic sentences having a different meaning correspond to two totally different scenes, but a common denominator shines, on purpose. From two drawings, literature shines.... There is the core of the discovery.
In 1932 Raymond Roussel wanted to make the complexity of his nested texts (which through endless lists, asides, footnotes, and parentheses with 9 levels of interlocking reference are not easily accessible), more comprehensible through the use of colour printing. The publishers initially rejected his experiments - which oversteped the paradigms of the book culture. A "Roussel - Reading - Machine" is only first shown in 1937 at a surrealist exhibition for which he had the text mounted on cards in the fashion of a round register: the upper edge is coloured according to the level of interlocking reference. The cards are installed around the axis of a drum, which the reader rotates with her/his right hand via a crank, while she/he arrests the desired text card through an upwardly protruding coloured marker with her/his left, so that the related text cards (of a particular level of interlocking reference) are presented in sequence..
* Kim Stanley Robinson, Memory of whiteness
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