hypertext

NTERTWINGLING is a work for the web and for live performance, which involves hypertext and improvised music. The hypertexts are very diverse and include aphorisms, parodies, poems, fragments of narratives, and quotations. These are connected by hyperlinks, which allow the screener to take many different pathways through the work, so each screening will be different (and not all will include every text). In a live performance, the improvising musicians must respond to the hypertexts sonically, but they can do so in any way they choose. The hypertexts were written and visually designed by Hazel Smith, with image backgrounds supplied by Roger Dean. The sound is taken from a live performance of the work, given in December 1998 at the Performance Space, Sydney, which involved extensive digital processing of electronic and acoustic sound, played by the austraLYSIS Electroband (Roger Dean, Sandy Evans, and Greg White). The recorded sound has been slightly edited, and is presented playing both forwards and backwards, in streaming audio. Intertwingling is a word used by T.H. Nelson (one of the pioneers of hypertext theory and practice) to describe the process in hypertext whereby everything interweaves and intermingles with everything else. It conveys the way the piece "intertwingles" different media, different types of text, and different kinds of subject matter (travel, place, desire, economics and ideas about narrative).

The egg, the cart, the horse, the chicken was written by Hazel Smith (text) and Roger Dean (sound). The hypertext and animations, written in Flash by Hazel Smith, are designed for a split screen. The texts in both the upper and lower frame are grouped into short linear 'scenes' which form an overall 'movie'. But the sequence in the upper frame can be disrupted by clicking on hyperlinks (marked in capital letters), which allow the reader to jump to texts other than the ones which follow each other in sequence. Consequently the juxtaposition of the texts on the two different screens is also variable. The piece engages with the way in which linear systems are constantly disrupted by non-linearity. This is written into the piece at a formal level by the use of the hyperlinks, animation and split screen, which tend to disrupt normal reading processes. Thematically the piece also addresses the ways in which a simple cause and effect relationship rarely operates, even within scientific systems. At the same time the hypertextual network interconnects many different ideas including the cultural significance of illness, the process of writing, the commodification of women's bodies, and the atemporal nature of memory.

The soundtrack, is an algorithmic piece Ligating for computer controlled keyboard sounds (2000). This sound piece is one of minimalist rhythmic complexity. The mesmeric 11 note cycle of the outset gradually evolves in pitch content, speed, and density of accompaniment. At a certain point when the pattern has become very fast, its rhythmic content changes quite dramatically. At this point the piece climbs to its conclusion; which turns out to be reversible, as the piece then plays backwards. The work was entirely written in MAX, the algorithmic composition and performance MIDI/sound control platform, so that performances vary, but this is a quicktime recording of one realisation, now fixed, for use with this web piece.

See Hazel Smith and Roger Dean 'The egg the cart the horse the chicken: cyberwriting, sound, intermedia'Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal of Computer-Enhanced Learning. Vol. 4. No. 1.  https://www.learntechlib.org/j/ISSN-1525-9102/v/4/n/1/ 

Hiperpopeia consists in a effort to transform in verses (with a epic intention, but in a free format) posts found in social media. Now almost with 10.000 verses, writting in a spand of a year, the acumulative, daily atualizations, aim to the same number of verses of the Iliad (15.693). With internal restrictions to the composicional method: names as the subjetc of the sentence; the verbs in the past perfect (the narrative and action-descretive conjugation); the vague, or overdescribed yet intencionally ambiguous, objects; and the intend to ignore the mediation of cellphones or cameras and even the social media as the medium - making the action be described as concret action. In that way, an effort to produce a machinal writing, to be reproduce in some form by algorithimic writing.

Work on We Descend began in 1984, when five words came unbidden into my mind: “If this document is authentic…” I had no idea what the phrase signified: Who’s saying this? What document? Why wouldn’t it be authentic? How would it be authenticated? By what authority? How would that authority be established? Where did the document come from in the first place? As I pondered these questions, a clutch of fragmentary writings began to appear under my hands — via the standard tech at the time: fountain pen, notebook paper, clipboard.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/we-descend/)