Hypomnemata

Discussion and Creation of the HyperEssay - Randall Packer

I - A Brief History of the Blog

What is the hypomnemata? - According to Foucault, dating back to the ancient Greeks:

"In this period there was a culture of what could be called personal writing: taking notes on the reading, conversations, and reflections that one hears or engages in oneself; keeping kinds of notebooks on important subjects."

Plato added that the hypomnemata constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought.

Vannevar Bush & the Memex (1945): The extension of memory through the invention of the hyperlink.

"He [mankind] has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory."

Ted Nelson & Hypertext (1963): Uniting non-linear association with creative writing

"Everything is deeply intertwingled"

Alan Kay & the Dynabook (1968): A single device that integrates all the media

"Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your sense of sight, and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change."

Tim Berners Lee & the World Wide Web (1989): The proposal for a universal information network

"An important... is the integration of a hypertext system with existing data, so as to provide a universal, and to achieve critical usefulness..."

Jorn Barger and the Web Log (1997): Logging the Web (tips for bloggers)

"A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share."

Rachel's Diary (1997): Presaging the modern day blog (my comment on 10/20/97)

"The bulk of the Reinyday site, including thousands of pages and images, is my online diary. I began it in 1997 while I was in college. One month into it I met a man named Matthew. Seven years later, we got married. The next year we bough a house and had a baby. Our second baby is due in June. Now you're all caught up."

Part II - Integrating Media in the Blog Space

The blog as a teaching tool in AU's Multimedia program

Examples of media integration:

Google maps

Advanced Mapping

photographic essay

Twitter

sound files

sound art compositions

YouTube video

video art projects

Part III : The HyperEssay

The HyperEssay brings together the integration of multimedia and critical / creative writing. HyperEssays by students studying multimedia art offer the opportunity to exploit the full potential of the medium in conjunction with the analytical experience.

Examples:

Interview with artist Vibeke Sorensen

Essay on Liquid Architecture

Personal blog essay on Liquid Architecture

Part IV Coda: Artist Blogs

Blog Chronicles of the Secretary-at-Large
Randall Packer

Life Out of Context
Jeff Gates

Cory Archangel