[Nettime-bold] HRC Manifesto: Has it stood the test of time...

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

Manifesto
 	 The Hypermedia Research Centre 

(HRC) is dedicated to the research and 
development of hypermedia - and the 
maximisation of its potential for social, 
artistic and technological creativity. The 
Centre is based at the Harrow campus of the 
University of Westminster, which is a long-
established and well respected art school. 
Because of its location, the HRC will be 
closely working with students from a variety 
of arts and media courses. Like their 
predecessors in earlier decades, the present 
generation of arts and media students are 
pioneering the latest forms of popular culture. 

Manifesto Manifesto

	In the 1990s, the most innovative 
types of artistic expression are increasingly 
to be found on the Net. From being an 
experimental tool of a small minority of 
academics and technicians, the Net is now 
rapidly turning into an integral feature of 
everyday life. Already most public and private 
institutions have partially introduced 
information technologies into the workplace. 
In the future, everyone will live part of each 
day in cyberspace. The new hypermedia is being 
formed from the technological convergence of 
the media, telecommunications and computing.
 Long predicted, this fusion of different 
technologies around common protocols is 
producing something that is more than the sum
 of its parts. 

	

For example, hypermedia is not just the fusion
 of many different types of media into a 
single format, but also the inclusion of the 
interactivity of telecommunications within the
 media. As shown by the pioneering on-line 
systems - such as the MINITEL Network in 
France - successful hypermedia has to include 
a combination of both information and 
communications services. At present, these two
 facilities of the Net usually have to be
 accessed through different forms of software.
 For example, information retreival is most
 easily done through World Wide Web browsers 
which allow users to choose their own 
information - in text, visual or audio form - 
from computer databases across the world. In 
contrast, conferencing between people is best 
carried out through 

	Bulletin Board Systems or MOOs - a text-based 'virtual reality' environment. Through a combination of good design and software innovation, the HRC now aims to integrate the best features of the Web and InterNet conferencing systems into a powerful 
integrated piece of software. For this work, 
the Centre will actively participate within 
the global InterNet software development 
community. In the traditions of the Open 
Software Development already used within the 
Net, the HRC wants to act as a catalyst for 
the development of an open, cross-platform 
software architecture, which will create the 
next stage of accessible multimedia 
communications on the Net. As a first step in 
this process, the HRC is developing its own 
interactive Web site with 3D graphics. 


Visitors to the HRC site will be able both to 
browse information and communicate with each 
other. Within this experimental 3D social 
space, people will meet, work, learn, trade, 
flirt or play games with each other. Alongside 
software development, the Centre will also 
design a virtual architecture which will allow
 users easily to interact with each other. The
 design of visual social space is one of the 
key problems in the next stage of the 
development of hypermedia. From its utopian 
origins as a science fiction fantasy, the 
construction of cyberspace has now become a 
practical question of virtual architecture. 
The HRC will investigate how information can 
be navigated and meetings negotiated inside 
the new 3-D world being created by hypermedia.
 However, the most exciting thing about new 
information technologies are the social uses 
made of them. The way a new machine is 
incorporated in our culture depends upon the 
actions - and imaginations - of ordinary end 
users. With the development of enhanced Web 
software, the biggest obstacle currently to 
the spread of InterNet use is the lack of 
interesting and exciting on-line services for 
general users. Therefore the HRC will use its 
social and software knowledge to research and 
create these exciting services for the new 
generation of non-technical InterNet users. 

Based at an arts and media college, the Centre
 will be able to draw on the talents of 
enthusiastic students to invent new forms of 
cultural expression for the site. By providing 
innovative services for its users, the HRC 
InterNet site will become the nucleus of a 
self-creating, self-sustaining 'virtual 
community' within cyberspace. The building of 
the HRC's interactive Web site is the first
 step in a long process of research. Many 
people have had the vision of the CyberGrail: 
a full-blown, photo-realistic 3D, jack-in 
sensorium. But, on the way to realising this 
techno-utopia, there are many hard and 
difficult stages of development to be passed 
through. The HRC believes that many useful 
modes of communication are possible over the 

Net, such as: 
	Interactive TextThreaded 
TextHyperTextVoiceSymbolic interfacesShared 
WhiteboardShared Maths padVideo 
ConferencingShared Project PlanningCyberSex 
InterfacesShared 3D Sketch padMulti-User 
gamesFile ExchangeVoting Systems etc. By 
exploring the possiblities of these various 
InterNet facilities, the HRC will acquire the 
experience for the next key stage in the 
development of hypermedia. This is the 
creation of a multimedia on-line conferencing 
systems and a combination of the InterNet with
 CD-ROM machines. The HRC believes that the 
construction of visual on-line meeting places 
will at the centre of the final convergence of 
media, telecommunications and computing. In 
time, these fully visual virtual spaces will 
eventually become as popular with grown-ups as
 Sega or Nintendo are now with children and
 teenagers. At this point, the age of 
hypermedia will have truly arrived.



-- 

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