The eight-year-old Byderhand project of the subject group Creative Writing at the North-West University has been selected to form part of an international hypertext creation exhibition that will take place in Rome soon.

“This is singular international recognition for the subject group Creative Writing, and particularly for the garden-verses arm of the Byderhand project in the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden,” says Prof Bernard Odendaal.

Exhibition offers a glance at hypertext works of more than three decades

The exhibition, Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms, forms part of the Hypertext and Social Media 2023 congress of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, which will be presented from 6 to 20 September. The Capitoline is regarded as one of the oldest museums in the world. It is famous for its collections and exhibitions of ancient art.

This special exhibition offers an overview of hypertext works of the past 35 years. The aim is to enrich congress participants’ understanding of the various ways in which artists across the world have expressed themselves through hypertext. The exhibition aims to introduce hypertext to new audiences, both as a scientific field of study and an artistic practice.

It contains a wide range of hypertexts that have been created by artists and scientists since the middle of the 1980s. According to the curator statement it uses various digital platforms and approaches to provide an exploration of the developing forms of hypertext creation that appeared and that, as the media theorist Jay David Bolter alleges, significantly affected the way in which people think (for more information, visit: https://the-next.eliterature.org/exhibition/hypertext-and-art/curatoria….)

According to the curator, Prof Dene Grigar of the Washington State University, Vancouver, the exhibition looks back at the historical, artistic and scientific progress that has been achieved from the end of the printing press era up to the beginning of the digital era.

More about the Byderhand project

The Byderhand project involves the installation of digitally mediated poems and related artistic material in botanical and other gardens in a number of places in South Africa.

“It involves the so-called locative literature, in other words, poems and other texts that, by way of, for example, smartphones with which QR codes are scanned, can be read and listened to next to the plants or other garden objects that have those creations as topic,” says Prof Franci Greyling, who represents the Byderhand team. For more about Byderhand, visit http://www.byderhand.net/.

The Byderhand project was included in the exhibition theme: Beyond the click: Experimental methods for navigating and experiencing hypertext art.

It is particularly the part of the project in the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden – with the emphasis that has been placed on wide access there – that will stand out as unique among the other works in the exhibition.

The Byderhand Karoo Garden Verses installation forms part of the braille route that was launched in September 2022 in the botanical garden in Worcester mentioned above.

The project was undertaken in collaboration with the garden management there and the braille route and garden verses installation were planned and undertaken in integration with proposed garden developments.

Plaques with the works of 10 poets from the area were placed at strategic locations along the route, where visitors can read and listen to them on their cell phones. The poets, including two blind poets, William Rowland and Jacques Coetzee, read their poems aloud themselves. The sound experience is expanded by musical arrangements of the poems, as well as translations into English, German, Portuguese and isiXhosa.

Adding further value to the trail is the fact that the Byderhand platform and interface are used in conjunction with the visual and braille notice boards to make botanical information available along the route. This audio guide contributes to accessibility and the richness of experiences for the visitors to the garden.

Visit the exhibition site at https://the-next.eliterature.org/exhibition/hypertext-and-art/index.html.