Mount Chimborazo flora, topography and altitude mapping,
source: Alexander von Humboldt, Geography of Plants, 1807.

Mapping the movie

Kohonen mapping is a chorographic, neural-net technique, developed by the Finnish mathematician, Teuvo Kohonen, to extract more meaning more quickly from a large pool of data, by visually clustering it according to parameters pre-set as relevant for the pool.

H|U|M|B|O|T applies Kohonen mapping to both its cyberscript of Humboldt's book, which we call FLATBOOK, and equivalently marked-up H|U|M|B|O|T digital video clips, which we call FLATMOVIE, continually added to until the end of 2004.

Our subjectively valued emotional, locational, temporal and keyword parameters attached to both FLATBOOK and FLATMOVIE, assure a poetic yet intelligent mapping that matches our lyrical and informational pool of content, offering strong cybercinematic potential, once H|U|M|B|O|T is set in motion by Internet users.


Weaving Humboldt with H|U|M|B|O|T

Humboldt's Personal Narrative... first becomes a cyberscript when it is Kohonen mapped to the screen, marked up, paragraph by paragraph, according to its emotion, location, time and keyword, and fed into the Kohonen mapping program.

Paragraphs from Humboldt's book lose their pages, shun their linear sequencing in favor of visual clustering and associated hyperlinks. The text as a whole leaves the book behind, and self-organizes into a chorograph of of content and concept, in which page numbers and chronoloy are attributes rather than reader controls.

Digital video content uploaded continually over 5 years complements without nostalgia, and contrasts Humboldt's autobiographical and scientific chronicle from the New Continent (FLATBOOK) back then.

H|U|M|B|O|T digital video clips are interwoven with Humboldt's text passage (FLATMOVIE), when emotional, locational, temporal and keyword attributes have been assigned to describe each visual clip, and get uploaded to Internet screens by any author, anywhere, anytime

 

Glocal user montage

A screen weave of FLATBOOK and FLATMOVIE presents users on-line with a poetically intelligent cyberatlas of Humboldt passages and H|U|M|B|O|T scenes, in which they become travelers, exploring, navigating, selecting and sequencing content on the new New Continent called cyberspace.

As each user travels through our cyberatlas of words and images, they leave a trace of their itinerary on the site, which our code then calls to poetically edit or montage for future users selecting not to navigate but to spectate H|U|M|B|O|T as a hypermovie which automatically streams texts and clips according to a log of recent user itineraries on the site.

H|U|M|B|O|T creates an deep screen atlas with travel-as-art-as-information content. Users become virtual travelers, whose moves montage hypermovies for other travelers, future users.