I sent a message to the webartery list that’s been receiving some thoughtful, friendly responses, so I thought I’d post it here as well. Warning: some of the material will be familiar from my sidebar and past rants…

Reading Jim’s comment that he wouldn’t describe The Agent’s Story as “primarily or typically hypertextual” got me thinking about what we consider hypertext to be.

Given that the term “hypertext” was coined by Ted Nelson, I think it’s interesting that we so often treat it as though it means “node and link,” which was not how Nelson defined it. Here are a couple Nelson quotes:

“Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’* to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. (* the sense of ‘hyper-’ used here connotes extension and generality; cf. ‘hyperspace.’)”
– Ted Nelson, 1965

“‘Hypertext’ means forms of writing which branch or perform on request; they are best presented on computer display screen.”
– Ted Nelson, 1970

Node and link hypertext is a subcategory that Nelson called “discrete” or “chunk style” hypertext.

Certainly the term hypertext is not now commonly used as Nelson defined it. And Nelson has also written about hypertext in different ways in different periods. But I think it’s important that we begin to operate in the new media field as though we have a history.

Sure, we could say we don’t need to look at Nelson any more, and instead let Hypercard or Storyspace or the Web provide our definition of hypertext in the new media arts community. But (as I wrote recently on nettime) that’s like saying, in the 1950s, that Stalin’s was the current definition of socialism, so what Marx said when he defined the term was no longer relevant.

Certainly most works discussed on webartery aren’t hypertextual in the sense now typical — but I think the question of whether they’re hypertextual in Nelson’s founding sense is still one we need to consider. But most of us, myself included, have little practice with discussing things in such terms. We have a long way to go to reclaim our history.

One of my favorite responses so far has pointed out that an awful lot of new media writing could “conveniently be presented or represented on paper” (say, as picture books). Another response I liked included the line “i would add, as a personal aesthetic preference and goal that the work also ‘could not conveniently be presented or represented’ on film.”

Of course, this brings us back to The Agent’s Story — which for most readers could probably be represented on film, but for the featured browsers certainly could not. It remains a limit case.

A new collaborative piece, the second manifestation of The Impermanence Agent, is now online at the Whitney Museum’s Artport.

The piece is called The Agent’s Story. Because the project’s goal is to evolve over the course of the month — starting out as my unaltered story now, and moving to something containing almost none of my words within a few weeks — it might even be interesting enough for folks to visit more than once during February (not to press my luck). Here’s the description from the website:

The Impermanence Agent began in 1998 as a storytelling Web agent that customized its texts and images based on monitoring of each reader’s Web browsing. Five years later, the project is turning inside out — rather than showing each individual a story customized for them, it now shows all visitors the stories altered by a few “featured browsers.” During the month of February 2003, the Agent’s story will be progressively altered for these browsers, with the results continually viewable, and at the end of the month, the final version will be archived on the Whitney server. With this, the project’s weight shifts between individual experience and collective, between long-term customization and short-term surveillance, between impermanence and archiving. Most users now will never see our original story, but only the results of many browser-driven alterations — not our story, but the Agent’s. So we call this next stage The Agent’s Story.