About the same time that multimedia was becoming as common in homes as interactive fiction had a decade earlier, applications such as HyperCard, and the widespread use of HyperText Markup Language on the Internet and World Wide Web, saw an explosion in hypermedia. The distinction between ‘multimedia’ and ‘hypermedia’ is that the former denotes a variety of electronic media content — text, images, audio, video, etc. — whereas ‘hypermedia’ denotes linking media of any kind to produce non-linear networks. I’m sure all of you have at some point spent much of an evening following Internet hyperlinks from one thing to another, either to have your mind blown by a prodigious network of associated knowledge, or to realize you’ve just wasted an evening on so much trivial shit.
So where are the hypertext grimoires or interactive occult narratives? Where is the book that you can click on Enochian words and hear their pronunciations? Where is the book explaining planetary squares, which lets you generate a sigil on one right there in the book? Where is the book where you can toggle the text display between English and Theban — or your own cypher that you create elsewhere in the book? Where is the interactive Tarot or Tree of Life where you can touch any symbol and evoke a whole world of associations to that symbol, including, possibly, links to your own magical journal? Or where you can talk to the symbols, asking them questions about what they know. Where is Michael Howard’s The Ultimate Witch multimedia CD-ROM?
These are just a few of the most obvious interactions; more abstract, creative, or esoteric things are possible.
Obviously, multimedia and hypermedia are still very much with us today, and they are often major parts of more recent trends such a new media and transmedia. I don’t want to bore you with media taxonomy, but I do want you to understand there are people all over the world doing really cool stuff with the variety of interactions possible with today’s technology — and that variety is ever expanding. And even if you really want to write or publish physical books — either because you just enjoy them, or because that is your skill set — you can collaborate with others and augment those books with other media — such as when someone makes a companion music disc, or incense, or website, or viral media campaign. The book can become one node in a larger network of connected media. This happens anyway, organically, but we can intentionally design some of the network.
Hi HyperRitual,
excellent presentation so far. I think that the figure from Matthew Reinhart & Robert Sabuda’s Encyclopaedia Mythologica volume, Dragons & Monsters, is the Medusa and not the Sphinx. I’m not 100% certain about this, but I can deduct it from her snakey hair.
Keep up with the great work,
Plethon.
Hi, Nick. Thanks for taking time to check out my work. Look at the lower-right corner of the book; that is the transition I am referring to in the speech/text. :-)
Right, I get it now, thank you for pointing it out. I have finished watching the slide show and I find it brilliant. It does motivate to go out and start doing, creating, interacting… Please produce more work like this, we’re so thirsty for this kind of quality.
Cheers, man!