[ Marshall McLuhan 1969 ]

In his writings, Marshall McLuhan proposes to consider the technological innovations as the vector for civilization processes. Communication technologies are not defined as objects external to us, but as complete extensions of our sensitive apparatus, determining not only the modes of communication, but also the manner of perceiving and understanding our environment. As extensions of human capacities and senses, the communication media reconfigure and anticipate the transformation processes of the very society that created them. Through the comparative analysis of media, the printed medium - the book - as well as the electric medium - the telegraph - Marshall Mc Luhan points out the implication of communication technologies on social behavior settings and even on the structure of thought (knowledge) in modern society.

" Printing, was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft; by creating an analytic sequence of step-by-step processes, it became the blue-print of all mechanization to follow. The most important quality of print is its repeatability; it is a visual statement that can be reproduced indefinitely, and repeatability is the root of the mechanical principle that has transformed the world since Gutenberg. Typography, by producing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, also created Henry Ford, the first assembly line and the first mass production. Movable type was archetype and prototype for all subsequent industrial development. Without phonetic literacy and the printing press, modern industrialism would be impossible. It is necessary to recognize literacy as typographic technology, shaping not only production and marketing procedures but all other areas of life, from education to city planning. The age of print, which held sway from approximately 1500 to 1900, had its obituary tapped out by the telegraph, the first of the new electric media, and further obsequies were registered by the perception of "curved space" and non-Euclidean mathematics in the early years of the century, which revived tribal man's discontinuous time-space concepts-and which even Spengler dimly perceived as the death knell of Western literate values. "

[ Marshall McLuhan 1969 ] 1

As Marshall McLuhan underlines, the communication modes based on technology are all related to a proper structure transmitting, apart from the specific message, its own significance. For example, the technology of the printed media, the codes and the communication modes it employs, did not solely influence the production and distribution processes but also all activity spheres, from 'education' to 'town planning'. Consequently, the signification of the message depends not only on the intentions of the author, but also on a meta-construction which, independently from the subjective intensions, determines the field of communication. Obviously, if they have such effects on our society, communication technologies are not meaningless technical supports independent of the logics and codes they set up.

The digital revolution, succeeding to the analogical one, transforms existing communication systems within their space-time construction. Based on the transmission and the computation of information, the NTIC (New Technologies of Information and Communication) influence every organizational model (modes of production, work and knowledge), the communication processes (code, symbol) as well as the social transactions, and their spatialization. In this manner, the passage from text to hypertext, from analogical to digital technology, can be related to the transformation of an industrial society to a postindustrial society, from modernity to trans-modernity.

" Hypertext is an organisation of data and a thinking mode. "

[ Theodor Nelson 1981 ] 2

The association between the quotation of Theodor Nelson in ' literary machines', inventor of the word " hypertext", with McLuhan's above statement reinforces the idea that the communication modes are all directly related to a form of data structuring and coding that transmits, foremost to the specific message, a proper one. If the printed medium induced a rational thinking, a linear logic - from thesis and antithesis to synthesis..., the hypertextual organization of information is characterized by the possible absence of hierarchy and linearity that has structured our thought until now. The hypertext has become the emblematic model of a reticular (rhizomatic) thinking, replacing the classical hierarchical conception of relations ( analytical sequences ) into a system of interrelated fragments based on complex processes inside the digital media. As a new synthesis between communication, technology and space, it marks the transition from a structural thinking to a thinking in systems and processes.

" See how a community is created which is not a community of people who live in the same neighbourhood but a community of people who are linked by car, by telephone, by e-mail. A disconnected, discontinuous community but nonetheless a community. So this idea of linkage without hierarchy and linkage that has many possible patterns at the same time may be a useful way to think about the kind of physical civilization which tends to be growing up in a dispersed fashion rather than the concentrated, hierarchical city. "

[ David Kolb 1997 ] 3

The comparison between communication modes (the hypertext) and space models (the city) questions the structural and semantic transformation of our environment. the hypertext, associated to space and social structures of the city as polysemic support of dispersed yet inter-connected fragments, enables us to ponder on the possible space implications of new information technologies.

' Corresponding to the development of text from a linear, local and two-dimensional media to hypertext as a complex, translocal and multidimensional media, architecture has to transcend to hypertecture.'

[ Bernard Franken ] 4

[>] As part of the investigation on hypertext in its metastructure, the urban projects ' Liquid axis' and ' Transit[e] ' present the search for a new syntax that merges the contemporary cultural context with the new perception of urban as an entropic and topological condition. The extrapolation of the concepts of the hypertext leads to a new comprehension and perception of urbanity and architecture which incorporates as much the processes of communication, computation and the interactions that they generate, as their forms of representation. The projects illustrate the spatial and semantic mutation of architectural constructs towards concepts suitable for a 'hypertecture', such as the passage from text to hypertext.

' Text-based computing provides us with electronic rather than physical texts, and this shift from ink to electronic code -- what Jean Baudrillard calls the shift from the "tactile" to the "digital" (115) -- produces an information technology that combines fixity and flexibility, order and accessibility '

[ George P. Landow 1992 ] 5

The hypertext is not only one particular mode of data structuring, but is a data itself. It transposes us from the physical and tactile space of the "printed" medium, to the digital space of information. The digital medium operates on any information (a message and the meta-construction on which it depends) a reduction in a sequence of data in a binary language, into 0/1 (code) or in bit/second (data communication channel). Once digitized, information acquires new properties, as, on the one hand, it incorporates complementary parameters to its formalization (code/language), and its localization (hyperlinks), and on the other hand, it also becomes editable, polymorph (transformable in its structure and representation) and transmissible instantaneously - dematerialized.

"to inscribe is to write in, to place the mark of one thing within the fabric of another... Digital writing celebrates the loss of inscription by removing the trace from acts of erasure..."

[Marcos Novak 1995] 6

If the process of binary encoding/decoding is also a factor of transmissibility (any type of information using the same support passing through the same channels), it further more defines the appearance of information as a temporary state (entropy); it is the transposition of all stable " FORM " in " InFORMation" processes. The coding of information defines a process ( computation and communication) by which it will be formalized. While being released from the fixed inscription on a material support, digital information becomes instantaneously editable. Any change is carried out without leaving any trace, fixed inscription, this property illustrates the transformation of information from a given or fixed element to a temporal and transmissible one. This implosion of space to the benefit of time becomes a determining factor of hypertext. InFORMation processes actively integrate space and time as variables defining the hypertext as a form of instantaneous and dynamic reading. Nelson describes the hypertext in these terms:

" it is about a unified concept of ideas and inter-connected data, and the ways in which these ideas and these data can be edited on a computer screen. "

[ Theodor Nelson 1981 ] 2

The manipulation or edition of information correlates the act of reading to the act of writing, influencing the relationship between author and reader and especially the way and the manner in which information processes are experienced. The hypertext incorporates contents and links but also the instructions necessary to its own editing (presentation/representation), to its encoding/decoding (standard of alphabet/language, protocol of transfer) and to its indexing. A hypertext is formed not only of contents but also of code/language necessary to its "materialisation". One of the hypertext 's characteristic is that each sign, each color, each hyperlink is included in its structure and contributes to the construction of meaning. The hypertext is thus a system of elements in interaction, an environment in permanent reconfiguration, determining a space-time experience of the digital medium. Like modes of information structuring, the hypertext depends on this meta-construction primarily made up of process of encoding/decoding and transfer. These processes determine the information space, the network, as a device of transmission, weaving temporary inter-connections , a space composed and decomposed by data and the flows that generate them .

Consequently the hypertext is a system incorporating complex InFormation processes connecting parameters of space to time while transmitting specific contents. As the notion of flow is necessarily subordinated to the concepts of space and time, the hypertext can be described as a space-time system which dynamic state results from the processes of InFormation and its manipulation. The mapping of this digital territory has now become an innovative field of research on new perception and comprehension of space in networked information and communication structures.

[>] The examples drawn from the two urbanistic projects (liquid axis and Transit[e]) are based on the cartography of the urban structures in relation to infrastructural and communication flows. These mappings of space flows, 'datascapes' , operate as the analytical starting point of the project and constitute a dynamic vision of the urban space generated by contemporaneous space-time parameters, relating space, time and information in the setting of social matrix.

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[William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984, page 51] 7

In William Gibson's novel, the experience of the information matrix is directly related to the processes of mental space settings, conditioning behaviors (interaction, experiences) within the information space. By using urban metaphors in the description of information space, he highlights the parallels between space and social organization modes of the urban, and structuring and interaction modes of the digital networks. It reveals the existence of spatial models as possible representations of information structures.

Through a direct reading experience related to inFORMation processes and structures, the hypertext projects a mental space. As a behavioral system, it transposes the inFORMation processes into an active / interactive experience of space flows. The association of information structures and processes with the urban structures and infrastructure flows widens the comprehension of the relation between space-time and information, as well as their multiple implications in behavior and space formalization. In opposite to space-based concepts in the digital universe, the increase of information flows and its condensation of space define urbanity as a media.

Consequently, the social model 'city' changes from a 'static' and localised state into a delocalized and entropic condition. The urban density (congestion) is thus more of a mediated, rather than material setting, being formed by condensing information. The urbanistic obsession for appearance and the representation must now be concerned with delocalized, incorporeal and transmissible systems. Urbanism must now think in term of being in space-time matrices of connectivity, interaction and imagination, and drop the traditional questions of public and private space, of the localization of limits and the identification of built entities. Under the influence of new technologies of communication and information, the space structure of the city changes; by imposing their own territories and their own logistics, they destroy the existing urban construct. The local matrix of the city, constantly exposed to the influence of global and immaterial environments, is transformed into a 'glocal' matrix, generating and generated by material and immaterial flows.

The deterritorialisation of space and the dematerialization of signs furthermore erase the local space in its economic, social, political and cultural significations, and thus transpose our comprehension and our practice of space. The description of the hypertext as a space system on the one hand and the description of urban as an information structure, space flow, on the other hand, identifies the common parameters of these two approaches while widening both of them in their understanding. The transposition of the hypertext, in textual, bi- and tri dimensional forms, becomes the factor of a new space perception affecting existing space-time structures, their representations and the disciplines which conceive them- e.g. architecture and town planning.

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Towards a hypertextual architecture - from text to intertextuality.

"Electronic text-processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book. It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly on our literature, education, criticism, and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg's movable type. "

[George P. Landow 1992 ] 5

In printed text, the medium induces a preliminary structure which, in the case of the book, follows the linear sequence of the pages. In the hypertext, the dematerialization and the coding of information in transmissible data make it possible to bind scattered elements without any "physical continuum".

Freed from the fixed structure, and inter-connected in a network, the hypertext constitutes its significance not only by the specific contents but also by the invisible architecture of its links.

"Electronic linking creates hypertext, a form of textuality composed of blocks and links that permits multilinear reading paths. Electronic word processing inevitably produces linkages, and these linkages move texts, readers and writers in a new writing space".

[ George P. Landow 1992 ] 5

The hypertext is composed of independent textual fragments, where the continuity of reading is founded on its successive developments in the network, constituting its open structure. This allows an unlimited variation of organisation forms of data and an unlimited combination of expressions which generates multiple reading sequences through the various forms of interconnection - branches, chains, ... The hypertext can be conceived as a non-linear, or rather multi-linear and multi-sequential space, composed of inter-connected fragments woven in a network by using hyperlinks. It is this interconnection of text fragments that defines the intertextual character of the hypertext.

" Intertextuality is a process by which a text is present in others, the manner in which the texts refer perpetually to other elements in the space of cultural production."

[ Roland Barthes 1977 ] 8

In the space of the hypertext, each passage is an intersection point in which converge paths leading to other text fragments. The multiplicity of reading sequences and interconnection points in one textual entity destroys the traditional conception of text having a beginning and an end, transposing it in an undetermined variation, an open structure of hyperlinks. Eventually, the whole of the interconnections linking the multiple passages includes them all, to form the structure. Consequently, the intertextuality constitutes the fundamental parameter of the hypertext, bringing scattered elements in one space-time continuum. It is this interweaving of the rhizomatic structure incorporating the reader's trajectory (association) through which the hypertext reconstitutes continuously its specific signification. It thus offers a new comprehension of the writing space, not as a predetermined linear organization, thinking, narration..., but as a processual formalization.

" The readers, while moving through the network of texts, continuously move the center of their investigation and their experiment, and thus deform the principles of organization of the text. In other words, the hypertext provides a system infinitely recentrable, whose focal point depends on the reader, who becomes really active. One of the fundamental characteristics of the hypertext is that it is composed of fragments of inter-connected texts deprived of primary axis of organization. Any system of hypertext makes it possible to the individual reader to choose his own center of investigation and experiment. This principle means in practice, that the reader is not fixed in an organization or a particular hierarchy. "

[ George P. Landow 1992 ] 5

This quotation introduces the statute of the reader as an active element of the hypertext, not only in the permanent shift of a given structure, but also as parameter involving the reader in the temporal and semantic structure of the text itself. The displacement of the reader through the various fragments is a variable, thus defining the hypertext as a new discursive form replacing the systems based on the ideas of hierarchy and linearity by those of polysemantics and intertextuality.

[>] The transposition of the idea of a nonlinear information architecture in the urban project ' Liquid axis' leads to questioning the role of an axis as urban generator. The linear structure of the axis and its hierarchical organization of space is transgressed to operate not like a vector for geometrical composition (symmetry, axiality), but to emerge as a generator of textured fields. ' The hypertext' becomes the referent in restructuring the axis in its temporal stratification (historical layers of the city), and in its space organization (the new programmatic and infrastructure equipment). Overlaying three different systems, XL-PLEAT, S-PLEAT, CITY PLATES, the axis is conceived as a 'circuit' which extends the surface of the axis in its horizontal and vertical dimensions by a continuous fold bended through the different layers of the city while superimposing new transverse circulations and marking each produced node with a media display. The fusion of these three structures forms fluid tectonics, a ' folded time grid'.

For example, the superimposition of the archaeological excavations with a 14000 m² platform, which climax is a giant screen, reactivates the old agora in a cultural machine where the Greek decor merges constantly with virtualities projected from the screen. The axis as abstract and representative system is transformed into inter-connected ones, which incorporates as much the local material elements of the context as the unstable and global space of information flows, thus forming a fluid field of activity. The project composes an urban experience based as much on physical space as on digital space, condensing the global and the local in one single space-time construct. By these elements and processes, the project proposes a transformation of the linear structure of the axis into a laminated space, achieving the condition of a ' glocal' matrix intermingling as much the specificity of the context as the entropy (multi-temporal) and the topological (multi-dimensional) space of the digital medium.

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From Text to Texture

"With increasing frequency, cultural representations of Internet call on us to conceive of computer mediated communication in terms of space: more precisely, "cyberspace." This spatiality writes place and distance onto the medium, creating, as it were, a topography that becomes more salient to the user than the underlying configuration of technology. Topography serves as a highly appropriate word within a discussion of how these metaphors "write" space. As J. Hillis Miller uses the term, topographies are performative speech acts that simultaneously map and create a territory (4-5). With Internet, this performative function is even more marked, since no reassuring "ground" rests beneath the writing of place."

[Nunes Mark 1999] 9

In topography, texture is a term describing the four-dimensional field of a diffuse cluster, which in the case of the hypertext, can characterize its inter-woven structure in its multi-linear and multi-temporal aspects. The introduction of topography into the processes of communication in terms of performative language enables us not only to qualify the various structures of information, but also to describe their spatial implications.

"The highway metaphor calls to mind a system that facilitates and regulates the flow of traffic from destination to destination. In other words, it striates space by setting up a system where "lines and trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another" (Deleuze and Guattari 478). In "surfing" smooth space, however, "the points are subordinated to the trajectory. "

[Nunes Mark 1999] 9

As the quotation of Nunes Mark suggests, there are at least two possible topographies of information flows, one linear and point-to-point oriented, the other fluid and plan-oriented. This opposition between two possible spatial figures, the Web as ' superhighway' of efficient exchanges, on the one hand, and the open rhizomatic space, on the other hand, can directly be related to the Deleuze and Guattari 's model described in their writing 'Mille plateaux' opposing smooth space, or ' nomos', and striated spaces. In striated topographies, each point is fixed in a given position, determined by lines and trajectories, producing a static but effetient organization, while reducing spatial interactions in a plain one-way communication

In this manner, the striated space device tend to be a hierarchical and arborescent space, organizing information through levels and degrees. On the opposite, the model of smooth space is based on multiple inter-connections, similar to those of the intertextual structure of the hypertext, where each point becomes a relay and exists only as relay. This multidirectional interconnection produces a fluid plan 'shaping' electronic space as a continuous passage of transit - a nomadic space of digital communication. The hypertext is thus a reticular information organization, in permanent organisation directly related to a space-time experiment. The two forms of topography constitute the current models in the construct of space flows - computation and communication processes. This conceptual representation of information space and flows, directly raises questions related to those of architectural and urbanistic organization models.

[>] The title of the urbanistic project Transit[e] is the combination between the words ' site' and ' transit'. The term of Transit[e] describes the intermediate situation of a person, firstly a patial one - to be in between two places- , secondly a physical one- a condition of displacement. The title describes a particular state, in-between absence and presence, a transitory and ephemeral condition in which the static comprehension of space is erased in favor of a temporary and fluid one. The concept of transit(e) is today as much a question of mobility as a question of 'connectivity' widening the perception of the physical space to the perception of the mental one. Where the urban environments has been described as infrastructural networks, a space of flows determined by the congestion of infrastructure, the digital medium describes it as a "space in flows" of communication and computation - connectivity.

This fact leads to the implosion of space in favor of time, in other terms, to our projection in simultaneous, non-local realities in real time. New technologies thus transpose us in a permanent transitory zone, enabling us to be here and potentially everywhere in a time that one can record and store, as a form of fixed present - 'nunc stans'.

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The analysis of information structures makes it possible to determine space concepts specific to electronic communication forms and to relate them to behaviors and displacement settings.

The conception of the hypertext as an interactive device introduces the reader, who permanently negotiates the trajectory of his/her path (structure), in the constitution (mental setting) of the information space. He/she constitutes 'potential configurations', of which some were planned by the author, while others are the product of the reader's implication. The reader consults text fragments, connecting them in an unforeseeable yet temporal continuity, reinforcing reading as a single experiment, that sets the reader as a direct element taking part in the unfolding of the text. It is the reconfiguration of space by time where displacement becomes an essential parameter in the constitution of the writing space.

Consequently, the hypertext makes sense only insofar as the reader interacts. It is through the hyperlink, interactive and associative element of the hypertext, that the reader undertakes metaphorical or metonymic drifts (la dérive) rather than purely logical or causal ones. The implication of the associative and subjective potential in the information organization renders furthermore renders a hypertext as a polysemic and open structure. Just as the reading of a hypertext induces a new behavior based on the reader's active implication, the mental displacement he constituted can be described as a space experience comparable with the situationistic approach of la dérive.

" Between the various situationnists processes, la derive [the drift] is defined as a technique of hasty passage through varied ambiances. The concept of dérive is closely related to the recognition of psycho-geographic effects, and to the assertion of a constructive playful behavior, which opposes it in all points to the traditional concepts of traveling and walk. "

[Guy Debord 1956] 10

The situationist description of the urban experience 'la derive' is based on the interrelationship between geographical parameters with those of perception, displacement modes, behavior patterns and social structures. In this manner, the description of the city in terms of ambiances defines the perception and conception of space according to its potential of stimulation (experience),and is thus radically opposed to the functionalist approach. The interest for the psycho-geographic approach is founded on the vision of space settings not perceived any more as an external and static global unit, but as an experimentable environment generating situations by displacement through ambiances. Urban space is thus not determined any more by its functionality and its spatial coherence, but it is described as a scattered and heterogeneous matrix, "plaques urbaines (urban plates)", generating multiple ambiances programmed or not. Psycho-geography thus identifies a spatiality gradually projecting a mental map of actions and orientations, and defines, in the case of the hypertext, real time experiences via data structures.

[>] In the case of the urban project ' Liquid axis', the various fragmentary systems are weaved together while remaining identifiable; they give the possibility to create, through the 'circuit', a scenario, just like the reader does in a hypertext. The project stimulates individual and collective roving paths, generated by dynamic ambiances. This work on ' urban plates' emphasizes the potential of the context by creating specific situations while causing through media systems semantic and spatial interferences - extensions. The superposition of continuous elements (S-pleat/ infrastructure) connecting the different entities to scattered independent activity fields City plates, introduced the notions of displacement and fluidity via spatial, temporal and functional ruptures.

The combination of these systems and the interferences they generate transform the rigid pattern of the axis into a field of unstable situations, an abrupt sequence of ambiances.

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[ George P. Landow 1992 ] 5

The traditional forms of language became ineffective confronted to linguistic complexity, iconographic, ideological, spatial, temporal ruptures, and to grasp the hypertext in its integrity and its relation to the reader. Consequently, the hypertext cannot be defined any more as a univocal whole, but as a particular condition in which the immediate projection from one context to another transforms the text into a polysemic environment made of inter-connected fragments.

Roland Barthes describes this type of text: "...this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable . . . ; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language" [Roland Barthes 1977 ] 11

The hypertext is based on multiple combination processes of decontextualized fragments. By transforming the significance of the fragment on the one hand and by destroying the traditional forms of linguistic articulation on the other hand, it constitutes a new form of speech, and introduces new modes of writing. The hypertext is dynamic, offering a permanent confrontation between the figure and the thought or the fragments and the unit. It passes from a fixed syntax (articulated structure), to a fluid system which introduces various relations between fragments. The reader, deprived of a global vision of the structure, interacts in the limited space of the fragment and its various interconnections. He/she is continuously constrained to reconfigure his/her overall vision with each one of his/her movements in the textual network.

Consequently, the fragment becomes more and more an independent, autonomous yet inter-connected entity. The various textual fragments are not defined anymore in their relation to a specific unit, but in their various interrelationships, thus forming a heterogeneous and fluid "galaxy".

This shift generates the appearance of the accident, the complex, the hybrid...., as parameters determining the hypertext. Consequently, the passage from text to hypertext is the transformation of a sequential writing into a processual writing.

"There is a growing tendency towards an acceptance of the contradictory, of the superimposed fragmentary and of the conflictory. Such hybrid qualities is decisive. in order to activate such heterogeneous potential the object is to these qualities into foldable, malleable and adaptable materials : woven in the sense of expand, in order to retain a multifarious continuity. In the rhizomatic network, the weave enables additionnal potential for action, in that it remains both foldable and malleable as a chain of single elements in opposition to a linked network of roots,(smoothed heterogeneity)"

[ Knowbotic Research 1998 ] 12

As such, the hypertext is further defined through its malleable structure, integrating multiple meanings in a common system (the network). It redefines our relationship to the unit and the entity, by integrating the rupture and discontinuity as active writing parameters, merging reticular thought to fluid continuity. Through the InFormation process the hypertext furthermore allows the combination of various media; from a texts to images, diagrams, sounds, animations... One can define the hypertext as a system processing semantic links between locatable objects inside a polysemantic entity. It indicates an informative medium which binds textual and non-textual information, by forming hybrid combinations between existing media.

The passage from text to hypertext indicates the alienation of a homogeneous medium in a hybrid one, fusing various communication forms in a hypermedia. It becomes a polysemantic support, whose infinite combination of codes makes it possible to develop new forms of expressions and communication. The hypertext confronts us to the multiplicity of language, ' la differance', it becomes the transforming vector of communication modes (' browsable musics', liquid architecture', 'animated text'). The hypertext is thus a support transforming the comprehension of a unit and it leads to a hybridization of traditional communication forms.

[>] The condition of complete mediatized environment fusing physical space with the topological space of entropy is illustrated in the project 'Liquid axis' through the concept of white noise, a constant noise created by the interference of the entire sound spectrum, a diffuse information bandwith. The city, as a system saturated with information, is designed out of the combination and superposition of the specific social matrix of the city with the new condition of transmissible reality. Expressing a possible representation of this spectrum, the urban model is rendered in the freezed frames of the animation as an information field superimposing various film sequences with the axis' simulated space. These sequences suggest varied ambiances and activities related to the spatio-temporal context.

The virtual architecture of animations emerges like an artificial and discontinuous environment woven in a linear, single experiment in time, a 'travelling' along the axis. White noise illustrates the model of the hypertext as generator of multisequential readings, the product of a new synthesis between communication, technology and space.

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Relieved of a fixed and material structure, the hypertext is an interactive medium in permanent reconfiguration including as much the specific context of the reader as a digital network one. The static text was transformed into a fluid form in which the existence of multiple combinations constitutes a rhizomatic structure centered around the reader, introducing the individual in the collective space of the network. This malleable structure is acquired through the information processes, allowing the change and the evolution of its multiple components.

By integrating in these combinations the interpretative and associative factors of the reader, the hypertext exploits its constructive, emotional and subjective potential. It establishes a particular reading experience in real time, integrating cognitive and mental processes in its organization, thus binding the " perceptual " to "conceptual ".

" The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. "

[ Vannevar Bush ] 13

Consequently the hypertext is defined as a neuronal system incorporating computation processes in the organization of data (malleable structure). The same processes stimulate phenomena of spatialization and mental representation of the data structure by influencing the actions and the reader's behavior. As a space-time structure of data and an associative and emotional form of relation (interactivity) between the reader and the structure, the hypertext processes similar functions to the human brain. It is a neuronal system combining structure and behavior settings.

The brain, or ' memex' (memory expander) follows a structural and functional logic comparable with the one of the hypertext, revealing the complexity and the multiplicity of links which binds the concepts of mental space, memory and nervous system to melt them in one single construct.

"Liquid architecture is the tectonics of behaviour, affiliated with perpetual becoming, emergence, life, artificial and otherwise"

[ Marcos Novak] 1995 6

' Liquid', as fusion of the form and the action, time and space, founds a new space of communication and interaction. In the two presented urban projects, the various programmatic entities are not simply juxtaposed; they are immersed in a continuous mediated system. Conceived as a fluid system of networks, urban space becomes a support absorbing and diffusing information as phenomena or temporary events. The urban condition is regarded as a hyper[text]ure, a completely mediatized environment inside which chronological time and the entropy, geometrical and topological space, fuse in a new interactive zone, a liquid space - ' liquid axis', describing any urban experiment by a nomadic state - ' Transit[e]'.

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3 Kolb, David (1997) An Analysis of the concept of hypertext

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5 Landow, George P. (1992) Virtual Text, Virtual Authors, and Literary Computing, the Johns Hopkins University Press 1992 http://landow.stg.brown.edu/vp/virtual.html

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10 Debord, Guy (1956)

11 Barthes, Roland (1977),citation in hypertext - G.P.Landow - 'Roland Barthes and the writerly text' http://landow.stg.brown.edu/cpace/ht/jhup/contents.html

12 Knowbotic Research (1998), Urban Agency - Interview with Knowbotic Research and A.Broeckman http://www.khm.de/people/krcf/I0/explorer/content/text.html

13 Bush, Vannevar (1945) As we may think, The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 176, No. 1; pages 101-108, July 1945

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