Hyperland
Hyperland is a 50-minute long documentary movie about hypertext and surrounding technologies. It was written by Douglas Adams and produced and directed by Max Whitby.[1] It ran on BBC Two in 1990. It stars Douglas Adams as a computer user and Tom Baker as a personification of a software agent.
| Hyperland | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Technology |
| Written by | Douglas Adams |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language | English |
| Production | |
| Producer | Max Whitby |
| Running time | 50 minutes |
In the show Adams has a dream where he is browsing through various media. While Adams is browsing, many people and projects related to the general theme of hypertext and multimedia are presented:
- Vannevar Bush and his Memex[2] concept
- Ted Nelson explains hypertext and Project Xanadu.
- Hans Peter Brøndmo talks about the idea of animated icons.
- Robert Winter talks about an interactive version of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
- An idea from Kurt Vonnegut's book Palm Sunday is presented: stories and narrative structures have shapes that can be represented mathematically as graphs.
- Robert Abel shows his multimedia version of Picasso's Guernica.[3]
- Apple Multimedia Lab employees Steve Gano, Kristee Kreitman, Kristina Hooper, Michael Naimark and Fabrice Florin talk about a multimedia version of Life Story, a BBC TV movie dramatisation of the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA.
- Amanda Goodenough presents Inigo Gets Out, an interactive story for children using Hypercard.
- Brad deGraf and Michael Wahrman talk about their digital puppet Mike Normal.
- A NASA Ames Research Center scientist presents a prototype Virtual Reality helmet called Cyberiad.
- Marc Canter makes a cameo (non-)appearance as an animated icon that is not "clicked" by Adams; the audience never gets to see his interview.
The dream (and the documentary) ends with a vision of how information might be accessed in 2005. Hyperland does describe a number of features of the modern web. This is especially noteworthy because it predates the public release of the first Web browser by about a year.
References
- ↑ Ted Nelson: Possiplex. 2010, page 272f.
- ↑ Vannevar Bush (July 1945). "As We May Think". The Atlantic. Retrieved 1 May 2012.
- ↑ Robert Epstein (29 January 1991). "'Future Tense': The New Link Between Arts and Technology". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 1 May 2012.