HyperLink
HyperLink is an interactive web-based narrative investigating the link between how we live and how we tell how we live. It aspires to reach the meta-narrative mainly by using two mechanisms: Quranic narratology as a built-in structure, and feedback loop from the audience as content.
Poster image
The Holy Quran is a book of faith and literature. As a text, it is a unique textual medium; it exploits both words and structure to manifest its message. For example, The Holy Quran speaks about the human in multiple chapters; each verse is separate and serves a different narrative. This method of storytelling tells us two things: the narrative is a value by itself, yet this value only reveals itself in relation to the whole text.
This project looks into the Quranic Narratology, that is to study its narrative, narrative structure and how these affect our perception. It explores numerous obscure meta-narratives concepts; such as the narrator-narratee relationship and how the medium shapes the narrative. In other words, how to isolate the narrator from the process of explicitly linking the story's content?
The Quranic narrative has distinctive attributes, one of which is the narratee. The narratee is an active receiver of the Quranic text; given that he brings into its reading as much as the text offers, this makes his experience personalized and customized in all levels. Likewise, a key challenge becomes how to provide an experience that is responsive and meaningful at a personal level while maintaining a sense of shared narrative?
The answer to these abovementioned questions is to create a unique link; a HyperLink. HyperLink is a Web-based interactive narrative, it investigates this link through the lens of the Quranic devices, e.g., spatio-temporal circumstance, mode of action, and duration; by reintroducing them through different verbal, audible, and visual mediums. HyperLink uses Webpage(s) as the primary medium of narrative to set the virtual space; it questions its off-reality perception and that code is subject to human principles; his beliefs and impulses.
Online, we expose ourselves, our hopes, wishes, and desires. We express that by what we search for, read about, follow, and watch. This information is all archived as keywords. HyperLink uses these keywords to further define potential links and expand its narrative in a feedback loop. However, Web-based narrative conceals times, it challenges the webpage capacity to contain an engaging narrative arc.
In addition, HyperLink packages its content with audio-visual material to enhance the user experience and stimulates his senses. It represents obscure concepts with abstract symbolic shapes, e.g., the cube as a three-dimensional form of one's life: time, space and free-will; or the door sound as a solo entrance to one's experience.
The name HyperLink is inspired by the multiple realms interacting with one another in one's lifetime in modern days, i.e., the link between virtual reality and real life on various levels. As a whole, HyperLink is a project about the human experience and its influences, it believes in translating the reading of the Quranic text into our stories, and how we tell them.
A booklet of some of the Quranic devices used in the narrative structure.
If HyperLink was a book, between each two sections would be an endless number of pages... This concept has been translated as a website; to compile and distribute the feedback/input digitally, and offer a quick and global access to the narrative.
Walkthrough, main structure
Walkthrough, audience input
To take this experience to the real-dimension, and remind the user of his narrative we created HyperFlip. HyperFlip is simply a cube with a different word engraved on each side. Flip it, consider it, will you proceed?
HyperFlip, a stationary decision cube.
HyperClick is also a collection of mouse pads with quotes from the main narrative. It is -too- a reminding object, that the way we browse the internet: see, think and feel— is no different.
HyperClick, a mouse pad.
Exhibition images.