Douglas Adams - Hyperland

Description: The self proclaimed "fantasy documentary" begins with a shot of Adams asleep by the fire side with his television still on. In a dream, Adams, fed up by game shows, commercial and generally non-interactive linear content, takes his TV to a garbage dump, where he meets Tom, played by Tom Baker, a software agent that shows him the future of TV: Interactive Multimedia. Much like Apple Computer’s Knowledge Navigator concept, Tom acts as a butler within a virtual space populated with hypertext, sound, pictures and movies represented by animated icons. The documentary is centered on Adams browsing these media and discovering their interconnectedness, leading him for example from the topic Atlantic Ocean to literature about the sea to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the poem Kubla Khan by the same author to Xanadu and back to the topic of hypertext via Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu. Many aspects of the documentary show Adams’ love for Apple computers. In the beginning a Macintosh Portable can be spotted and most of the projects presented run on Apple Hardware. Even the general design of the animated icons featured in the dream is inspired by Mac OS icons. While Adams is browsing, many people and projects related to the general theme of hypertext and multimedia are presented: