Hypertext and Beyond...

The basic concept is both simple and complex, as old as literature itself and as young as the burgeoning technology: what if, instead of adhering to the strict linearity of language, the "this-page-follows-that-page" mode of the printed book, one could craft works that navigated along nodes, where choice rendered the piece different for every reader who experienced it?

This is the backbone of 'hypertext,' a mode of writing that has been around longer than many would think. The term itself was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965; in 1974, in his book "Dream Machines," he offered a succinct definition:

"By "hypertext" I mean non-sequential writing. Ordinary writing is sequential for two reasons. First, it grew out of speech and speech-making, which have to be sequential; and second, because books are not convenient to read except in a sequence. But the structures of ideas are not sequential. They tie together every which-way. And when we write, we are always trying to tie things together in non-sequential ways (see nearby). The footnote is a break from sequence; but it cannot readily be extended...."(Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, rev. ed. Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington, 1987, p. 29. )

The idea of "non-sequential writing" is therefore hardly new. Indeed, a writer like Gertrude Stein, whose "continuous present" alternately shocked and amused readers of the early twentieth century, may have been a pre-computer practitioner of hypertext.

However, hypertext didn't come into its own until the 1990s, when artists such as Judy Malloy(whose seminal work, "its name was Penelope", is available from Eastgate Systems, one of the premier publishers of new media: http://www.eastgate.com ) and Mark Amerika began to explore the medium's narrative features. Amerika's groundbreaking work, GRAMMATRON( http://grammatron.com/index2.html ), is something of a novel that unfolds along several paths; hyperlinks embedded in the text itself allow readers to jump from one section to the next, a feature essential to hypertext itself, and that which lends the medium its multilinearity. GRAMMATRON was the first hypertext to be featured in the Whitney Biennial.

But the medium didn't stop there. Like the technology itself, it continued to grow, as increasingly powerful tools for multimedia authoring became readily available. Many recent works feature Flash animation, along with audio clips, and many incorporate elements of almost MTV-like design. In fact, in many ways, Lit[art]ure (the term coined for these new works by Jennifer Ley, whose online journal, "Riding The Meridian," recently featured a roundtable discussion on trends in new media authoring, participated in by both Malloy and Amerika, as well as Loss Pequeno Glazier and Johanna Drucker)(This discussion can be found at http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/writin... ) has evolved so far beyond its origins in hypertext that the recent trAce/Alt-X competition changed its name and format from a primarily hypertext contest to one calling for New Media: "...these days hypertext represents only a small part of the palette of the web-based writer/artist -- it is no longer the whole ( http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/newmedia/overview... )."

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