the situation

over the past decade the Internet has witnessed the birth of a plethora of new and

previously impossible art forms. these range from the simple encapsulated motion of the

animated GIF to more complex approaches such as HTML-based website installations or

new participatory creative paradigms, the appearance of which has provided a crucial

alternative narrative to a mainstream contemporary art world increasingly plagued by facile

conceptualism and creative stagnation.

our mission

hyperplex will consolidate this movement by providing a fully non-commercial, central and

free online gallery space for these new art media. while other sites like dump.fm and

rhizome have provided valuable spaces for the creation and discussion of net art, what we

are building differs significantly from them, or indeed anything that currently exists, and will

therefore supplement rather than replace existing services. up until now, GIFs and HTML

installations have been scattered across the internet, found on disparate tumblrs and

personal sites, but there's no easy or efficient way to browse, view, curate and comment

on work. hyperplex will solve these issues with a broad and elegant approach that I will

outline in detail in subsequent paragraphs.

formats

hyperplex will aggregate, host, display and organize web-based artworks of any format,

from works represented by a single file to those distributed across many. due to the

complexity involved in finding a common paradigm through which to present works of

differing format, hyperplex will launch with support for the two forms through which net art

was born: animated GIFs and website installations. support for new formats will be aligned

with demand on an ongoing basis.

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automation

hyperplex is backed by a social graph crawler, designed & programmed from the ground

up toward the purpose of providing users with a realtime stream of relevant content. it

achieves this through an intermediate graph constructed from posts, likes and friend/follow

connections on Twitter, Facebook, tumblr, dump.fm and delicious. human feedback

mechanisms determine the expansion paths of this graph and the regularity with which

specific regions are update. always complete and up-to-date, this stream makes hyperplex

the ideal palette from which to curate. works aggregated by hyperplex from external

domains are treated by the backend in the same way as those uploaded directly from the

site itself; for the artist, therefore, sites like Facebook and Twitter can effectively serve as

alternate interfaces to hyperplex.

categorization

we!re making an ongoing effort to organize the work on hyperplex so that browsing feels

natural and filtering is intuitive. this happens at multiple levels:

- user galleries & tags;

- objective metadata/criteria (feature descriptors, color analysis);

- source context (social groups, popularity).

automated systems based on these criteria allow us to remove duplicates quickly and

identify remixed works.

the interface

the hyperplex interface is grayscale and minimalist; it!s designed to be both intuitive and

visually subtle in order to naturally focus user attention on art. central to browsing and

navigation on hyperplex is our nodal search system, which makes powerful database

search queries available to all users in an intuitive way. a single directed, autocompleted

search box allows filtering based on the criteria described in categorization, the source of

the work, popularity, keywords and so on. any number or combination of nodes - i.e.

search criteria - can thus be used. we!re working on “similar node” suggestion features in

order to help users find works that suit their taste.

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screenshots

the main page (a collection of featured images):

search (for works originally posted by vokoda on dump.fm):

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a gallery:

the image landing page:

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release schedule

the first public version of hyperplex will launch on June 1st at 1200 EST, with support for all

the features outlined in this document with a few exceptions:

- no objective categorisation;

- reduced website installation support;

- experimental ranking algorithms.

these will be completed and rolled out over June.

future plans

our priorities for rolling updates to hyperplex in the near future are:

- the expansion of available display options beyond simple grid view;

- making browsing and art discovery as intuitive as possible.

funding

from a technical point of view hyperplex is very close to completion. we!re attempting tocollect $1000 in early funding through our kickstarter page; this will be used to payAmazon EC2 hosting and bandwidth costs, which due to the number of artworks we storeand process and the complexity of our social graph crawler, are significant. any help youcan provide in this area would therefore be greatly appreciated. hyperplex is an entirelynon-commercial project and will remain it for the foreseeable future.

contact us

press@hyperplex.net 

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