eft channel: hyper reader and writer hei+co@hyperdis.de (aka heiko idensen) says "live" what comes to his head ... (= SPEAK)
right channel: cut-ups and collages of historical/hysterical hyper texts (= LISTEN)
the mix is the bottom line:
who's sitting at the mixing desk? when is something faded in resp. out? which parameters and effects are used?
a hyper-text audio-book should definitely have a record button!
whilst hyper-text theorists and prophets predicted an exponential, uncontrollable increase of the electronic text rotation, publishing houses respond to the growing breakdown of the book market with audio books as a remedy.
as a consequence, in dealing with literature a revolution comparable to that in the music industry of the 1980s triggered off with the introduction of the walkman is finally happening: a mobilization of the listening situation taking the urban environment into account; the possibility to mix the internal listening space with any desirable external sound environment or everyday sound-scape.
and just as the text-message effect is introducing the mutation of cell phones into text tools (and, at long last, we can't only listen to our own music selection everywhere, but can also write texts at any time and place) ...
... hyper-listening is based on including tones, sound, the noise of different channels, the clacking of speaking tools and devices, the voice's scragginess ... in the electronic text rotation again:
classically, hyper-text has totally rid itself of the voice: as a topographical text, as a mapping of texts on books' pages (visual poetry) or monitors it rather performs a poetry of links and networking than of sound, of metrics, of the spoken word ... there is no story – not even to mention a narrator ... actually, hyper-texts are as unsuitable for speaking or reading aloud as source code ...
audio hyper-texts whispered into one's ear include dramatic scenes from hyper-text history; one can hear the clacking of the MEMEX's lever, and from far away foucault invokes the laughter of the chinese encyclopedia ...
...
it's not all about turning the audio-book into an mp3 audio-book, but to connect the production instruments and media of hyper-text (weblogs, text-message love stories, collective writing projects ...) with the worlds of sound and listening: web radios, experimental literature programmes, lectures, radio plays in and from the internet.
... to sing and orchestrate the old song time and again:
"to transform the broadcast from an apparatus of distribution into an apparatus of communication."
(bertolt brecht)
heiko idensen 2005
