Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing
From the abstract:
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.
A group of us (pretty much the contributors to this volume and Terry Rosenberg one of the editors) got together in Melbourne at least a good two years ago to toss around responses to Paul Carter’s Material Thinking. This lead to draft papers being presented at ConnectEd: International Conference on Design Education in Sydney last year, and now these have been honed, critiqued, polished and published. You’ll find all the papers in the current issue of Studies in Material Thinking including my own essay (they’re all pdf’s by the way). My essay is about how hypertext writing as a specific sort of academic practice has its own material affordances, thinks about what these might be, and uses Deleuze and Lévy’s distinction between the virtual and the actual to define this and to propose a ‘crystalline’ model of hypertext writing. YMMV.