Hyperlinked
Carolina Acosta
With our generation’s dependence on technological and social media connections, something lost within this development has been the quality of oral communication. It is that feeling, for one reason or another, of being able to express yourself or share something with someone better through a Facebook link or a text message rather than in person.
The aim of Hyperlinked is to help bring back the interaction of oral traditions where vocal tones and body gestures engage more personally than written or 2D media. The project combines the documented journey of going to specific people’s homes to share a dialogue, reconstructing the dialogue into physical objects, and a web platform that encourages the learning and sharing to continue. The interaction begins with the same question to each person: “What was the last thing you remember learning or finding out online?” Each participant is filmed as they communicated a “link” they remember seeing online. In doing so they embody the webpage, providing knowledge, and removing the disconnect normally created by the computer screen.
Their stories are published on the website that then also allows commenting to the video archive via webcam or audio recording. The focus on vocal storytelling adds to the documentation of this generation. Hyperlinked attempts to collect what they are learning and remembering off of the internet, their mannerisms, their memory, and the products they generate via the the fusion of oral and digital communication.