Aurèle Crasson

Genesis and Hypertext: Exchanging Scores

It is difficult to give a precise definition’ of hypertext since, in addition to its use as a technical tool, there is the conceptual dimension of a space for organizing memory and mapping connections. People often confuse the hypertext system, which makes it possible, through the digital medium, to link objects of different types, with the products (compositions?) created by means of this technique. Hypertext cannot be limited to either of these aspects. Like ink and paper, it is a medium for composition and expression and should also be seen as such. Whatever its purpose, and even if it involves collecting together pages on the Web in an ad hoc manner, hypertext delineates areas of knowledge and thus helps to produce a dual temporality, one that belongs to documents, the other characterized by instant actualization (which coincides with the eradication of any distance of space or time between the items of information). Researchers at Altavista and Compaq show that the Web generates a type of ’bow-tie’,2 where the centre is hyper-connected at the expense of the wings. This should be seen implicitly as a space for composition. Although a whole raft of tools and analyses were needed to prove that the Web is not organized like a spider’s web, it is possible to demonstrate on a smaller scale that a hypertext produces a shape that is more or less patterned. Because the contents in a digital memory have neither time nor place, using hypertexts may make us think that one screen follows another, with the organization of links thus appearing to be secondary compared with the data. The purpose of hypertext is not only to bring documents together but also to create a new document on the basis of familiar data, even if it is of necessity heterogeneous. Thus it is possible to envisage hypertext based on an abstract model, as an evolving structure, building up probable pathways; these do not define convergent points from one node to another but moving contexts that determine each other. The complexity of hypertexts also arises from the fact that the construction phase, which would correspond to writing time, and the consumption phase, which would be reading time, may merge into one another technically. So it seems worthwhile to develop the idea of a hypertext where the structure created would not be the result of users’ interventions but a musical score that is planned to make the contextualization process relevant.