Timeline Continued

In the early 1960's, Ivan Sutherland developed the Sketchpad system. Sketchpad was a launching pad for modern conversational interface systems. Allowing users to manipulate objects, magnify their workspace, and perform recursive operations, the interface ushered in the future of user-empowered programs. Sketchpad opened up a new digital world for graphic art.

Roy Ascott observed the impending shift in new media art from linear production to audience participation to full two way interaction. Ascott wrote The Construction of Change in 1961 to distinguish the interactive potential of new media art from participatory art such as Allen Kaprow's Happenings. Ascott also references cybernetics, as he encourages the artist to fully understand the science of behavioral experience.

A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate returns to textual possibilities in new media. In the essay, published in 1965, Ted Nelson coins the term hypertext. "Hyper...connotes extension and generality." Nelson goes on to define hypertext as "a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper." Though today's world wide web is woven together with a hyperlinking system, we still have not acheived the whole vision of what Nelson meant by the word, embodied in his described filing and listing systems, ELF and PRIDE.

Feeling threatened by the mathematical realism of computer science, the literary field responded in 1961 with A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau. The work invited the reader to cut apart the lines and reconstruct the poem, a style predating refridgerator magnetic poetry. The method attempted to reconfigure "the relationship between reader, author, and text." Later, computers were utilized to break apart and restructure poetic creations, a move that ultimately married literary art with mathematics as artists began looking at the algorithms of possibilities.