1996 – (a) Poetry should be made by all! From hypertext utopias to cooperative net-projects - Heiko Idensen

Texto

From hypertext utopias to cooperative net-projects

By Heiko Idensen

The explosive expansion of the WWW changed the use of hypertext-programs and concepts: from artistic and academic experiments in the seventies to a new kind of network-hypermedia. But what happend to the utopias of hypertext by the way? - Did all readers become writers? - Are avantgarde techniques in literature and art now available for all users? - What about poetics/ethics within networks?

Visualizations and dramatizations of data presentations, simulation techniques, desktop publishing, desktop video, the hypertext revolution of the WWW ... make the screen as a virtual surface the favourite place of cultural exchange processes: on screen thinking - writing and reading on the net.

Connected

The post-modern technologies and sciences leave human beings behind as nomads hooked up to the network of telematic multimedial systems: culturally imprinted by the alphabetic book-culture, informed, seduced, and emotionally fed by audiovisual mass media, mentally stimulated, fascinated and inspired to speculations and visions by the new information technologies. The myths of the text society finite text, authorship, legitimization in the context of "great stories" (ideologies) collapse in the interfaces of the information media, in the circulation of endlessly interchangeable information particles: texts, pictures, sounds are floating through information channels ... networking as an art of cross connections, of being on the way, of being everywhere. ... nomadic interwoven cultural techniques arise ...

Everything can be connected to everything!

The classic separations between production and reception (e.g. between author, text, and reader or of code, sender, and receiver) will be abolished in favour of a text-network- conception:

In active processes of intertextual generating of texts from texts, images from images, media from and within other media ..., reading and writing will overlap. The making of references substitutes the conventional receiving and sending of media documents. Media Networks contrary to the linear-sequential writing of printed texts, electronic documents are divided in small, discrete units: the screen, the card of a hypertext system, one data record of a data base, the text, image or action window of an object oriented working surface, a message on the board of a mailbox ... have manifolds relations with each other. The network of such objects of ideas and mental images requires from the beginning a multiperspective way of organisation - a networked thinking which allows different approaches and connections.

Enlaces

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19991108225104/http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/hypertxt.txt