Page 3 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 3/206
Memex could store records (files) in the form of microfilm, together with our typed notations, and ‘associations’ – the conceptual links with other documents that made them a valid expression and communication. This Memex machine could scan documents, make copies of them on microfilm, archive them with an index number, and retrieve them on demand, either by browsing through the archive (viewing the enlarged documents on a rear-projection screen), by typing a keyword, or by clicking on a link from one archive document (record) to another. Not only that, but the user could add notes and links to other Memex records, and if needed, build an associative trail of links connecting several or several dozen records together. He could then send this ‘trail’ of links to other Memex owners, so that they could follow the same logic, examine the argument, peruse the same evidence, the same diagrams, the same pictures. It was like hypermedia - foreseen in 1945!
Its always good going back to the prime source - Bush's As We May Think article is widely available on the web - and Bush's idea of associative trails is an important insight still to be properly productivised for the post WWW generation. In the 1980s I was working with colleagues at the Computer Graphics Workshop at Newham College. We were building a multimedia learning program for the UK Government Training Agency. We built an inference engine into this program to check how much/how long students had been exposed to items of information (we called them learning nodes), then to provide automatic suggestions as to how to reinforce the latest learned information - by accessing other nodes, repeating a sequence, testing their accumulated knowledge (etc). This got close to the 'associative trails' idea - but lots more could be done here...
Bush's article and his ideas permeate through the next half-century, inspiring Douglas Engelbart in his Augmentation research sponsored by ARPA and DARPA, Ted Nelson in his development of Hypertext and his Xanadu hypermedia system from the 1960s and on to other advanced researchers like Tim Berners Lee (World Wide Web 1989-1992), and Wendy Hall (Microcosm hypertext system 1993). So, the Memex - though never built exactly as Bush imagined it - was the idea that inspired hypertext and hypermedia - the magic links that glue information and media together in the 21st Century.
And of course, hypermedia was built upon the still developing global Internet, theoretically accessible to everyone with a computer and a telephone.
This book is an introduction to the MediaPlex, just as my websites including mediainspiratorium and media + art + innovation (https://mediartinnovation.com/tag/bob-cotton/) and my mediainspiratorium ipad app are ‘tasters’ or introductions to this way of encouraging inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary thinking. If you discover or know of something that should be in this collection, please don’t hesitate to inform me. For although this selection of media-art innovations is very much my own, it naturally rests on my limited knowledge base - the more contributors, the more complete the overview.
Bob Cotton: bobcotton@mac.com