306 W. 7th Street No. 301 Kansas City, MO 64105 (Home address)
Degree: Ph.D.
Format: CD-ROM
Description:
Memory Media is a hypermedia volume about hypermedia. A CD-ROM for Macintosh, the project investigates hypermedia technology by combining text, images, animation, video, sound, and music in an interactive environment. Above all, the project finds a complex relationship between hypermedia and memory. At the most basic level, hyperlinked volumes impose distinct mnemonic pressures on composers and users alike as they negotiate meaning in an interactive field. Because disorientation is a persistent problem even in very small interactive environments, electronic composers must design volumes that consistently provide navigational feedback to help users remember where they are. This is a new problem for writers but a very old problem in the history of communication, and Memory Media locates fruitful models for electronic composition across the breadth of the humanities, from photography and rhetoric to architecture and exegesis.
Far from restricting the inventive possibilities of hypermedia, these apparent constraints uniquely suit this technology for tasks conventionally assumed to be antithetical to electronic media. More specifically, Memory Media identifies interdisciplinary and historical synthesis as two memory systems distinctly conducive to the architecture of interactive multimedia.
Memory Media is intended for anyone with an interest in new media yet misgivings about the impact of technology on humanist culture. It proposes a decidedly humanist agenda for hypermedia and demonstrates how this technology might be used to reaffirm the relevance of the humanities in technological society. The CD-ROM also argues that such an ambitious future for hyperlinked multimedia can only be forged through experimentation with electronic composition. In this regard, Memory Media is a treatise on invention.
FOR INFORMATION ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MEMORY MEDIA, PLEASE FORWARD A MESSAGE TO: mshauf@udel.edu
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