H|U|M|B|O|T
C|O|N|10|T


Alexander von Humboldt's travel route to the New Continent 1799 - 1804.
source :
"Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent 1799 - 1804"
.
H|U|M|B|O|T's 1999 - 2000 zone of travel and digital content clip production.


H|U|M|B|O|T 1999-2004 Remaps Humboldt's famous South American Travels.

In honor of the 200th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt's landmark expedition to the New Continent of South America in 1799 - 1804, H|U|M|B|O|T revisits a very different South America over a 5-year period, 1999 - 2004. It slows new media down to remap without nostalgia Humboldt's text in light of H|U|M|B|O|T's digital content clips, produced from several forays in South America, and ØtherWhere on the New New Continent of cyberspace. Eventually Humboldt's passages will be buried by new digital content production, and thus become its template, its cyberscript.

H|U|M|B|O|T is cybercinema. It blurs boundaries, geo-temporal and narrative ones, as well as the more stubborn cinematic one between author and audience. The classical cinema screen boundary disappears and in its place H|U|M|B|O|T creates a deep multi-dimensional one, allowing audiences to cross-over and become co-editors in the H|U|M|B|O|T cybercinema.

And like Humboldt's painful search for a narrative form - it took him 35 years to write up what was a 5-year travel! - H|U|M|B|O|T connects things, mapping, clustering autobiographical, documentary as well as lyrical subjects and objects, according to subjective (reader) and computative (neural-net) measures, into a fascinating cosmos for reading, browsing and experiencing for many years to come.

H|U|M|B|O|T is a means rather than an end of cinema, and like its growing body of digital media content input, H|U|M|B|O|T's programming code [Burckhardt, Noll, Wenz] and delivery modes and aesthetic [Pocock, Stehle, Guppo A12, Øthers] also make leaps and bounds over its cybercinematic 5-year run.


t(R)opical chor(e)ography

With Humboldt's words as H|U|M|B|O|T's topos, and a neural net algorithm as cartographer, the H|U|M|B|O|T cyberscript, presents an electronic chorographic space of topics from the tropics, historically and presently, for audiences to navigate, their choices and traces choreographing, or chor(e)ographing, the screen space of hypermovies for future site users.



Connectionist Cosmos

"The more travellers research into natural history, geography or political economy, the more their journey loses that unity and simplicity of composition typical of the earlier travellers. It is now virtually impossible to link so many different fields of research in a narrative so that what we may call the dramatic events give way to descriptive passages."

source: Alexander von Humboldt, "Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Region of the New Continent", 1811.