This paper was written and presented as a hypertext, written in Tinderbox. This is the opening node:

In this hypertext I intend to explore four key tropes of what I'm going to provisionally label as 'digital environmenting' and their relationship to the idea of an affective atlas - or an atlas of affect. These tropes are intensity, vector, and the virtual and actual. These terms are based on a proposition for an affective atlas written by my colleagues where they stated "[an affective atlas] has intensities of the virtual and actual".

To this extent this essay perhaps offers little that is specific to the concept of an affective atlas, but is instead a sketching of the epistemological zeitgeist that informs the philosophical baggage that informs one facet of an affective atlas project. It is the projects intellectual and philosophical 'back story'.

What happens to editing when video moves from a hard to a soft environment? This chapter is a rough-cut sketch that explores what video editing is, and the implications of this for an emerging, network specific video practice. While this essay discusses video with some degree of specificity the practice that is under consideration is not video art but those works that are, for want of a more accurate term at this historical point, representational and in- dexical in some manner. They’re videos of things. Such representational practices dominate internet based video practice including commercial, populist, critical and creative uses.

This essay uses the material thought advocated by Paul Carter to argue for the materiality of writing. It does this by examining hypertext as an academic material writing practice, using ideas from design and hypertext theory. It specifically argues for a crystalline structure in hypertext as the actualisation of virtual possibilities via links and how this is different and novel in relation to existing academic writing.

This is a work that awkwardly begins to actualise a cinematic hypertextual academic documentary form. I think of it as a preliminary sketch towards a yet to be. It is also an analysis of the relation of videoblogging to television via Deleuze's concept of the 'any-instant-whatever' and the pose.

This is an interactive QuickTime essay that explores the relationship of a rhizomatic form to softvideo practice. It also details a series of video templates that have been created to explore alternative forms for online video.

Softvideo is a term applied by the author to video works which treat the computer as the means of production, distribution and consumption of video works. In these contexts video develops novel affordances or possibilities that problematize traditional uses and understandings of video as time based media. In this essay, which consists of a printed essay and an accompanying interactive academic QuickTime project, a critical and reflective analysis of a series of softvideo templates - the "rhizome templates" - is undertaken. These templates are publicly available and allow video bloggers and others to experiment with softvideo forms. The essay documents the use of the templates and situates them within a critical view of traditional video practice from the point of view of softvideo and video editing as a rhizomatic practice.

These are slides (presented as pdf) of some thoughts about writing as a specifc sort of academic material practice. I use some ideas about the actual and virtual to tease at this, eventually using hypertext as an exemplar. The work is to be developed into an essay.