Gregory Bringman - Early Works

Models of Reading / Hypertext (1993 - 1994)

A page for various "materializations" of contemporary literary theory in physical books and computer animation, produced in 1993-1994.

Figures

  1. Because of data processing limitations, until the mid-nineties, much of the computational turn in philosophy and theory dealt with computer operations on language or texts. When lower cost animation systems became available, it was then possible to visually spatialize hypertext theory. The study below of hyper / cyber text attempts such a spatialization, and in the steam-driven moment of the birth of digital media.
  2. Production files from another hypertext spatialization.
  3. Following Wittgenstein's attempts to describe mental processes in terms of media external to the human mind, I marked key points of classic works of literature using 3M tape flags, as maps of reading processes through these works. The silhouette of markers in the final image below is the resulting "map" of one particular reading I made through a library copy of Charles Dicken's Great Expectations. This externalization of reading has an analog in the contemporary use of computational linguistics in hand with textual corpora, and in the ways all modern machine translation or e-reader applications depend upon the formation of a "model" of reading.