the situation

over the past decade the Internet has witnessed the birth of a plethora of new and
previously impossible art forms. these range from the simple encapsulated motion of the
animated GIF to more complex approaches such as HTML-based website installations or
new participatory creative paradigms, the appearance of which has provided a crucial
alternative narrative to a mainstream contemporary art world increasingly plagued by facile
conceptualism and creative stagnation.

our mission
hyperplex will consolidate this movement by providing a fully non-commercial, central and
free online gallery space for these new art media. while other sites like dump.fm and
rhizome have provided valuable spaces for the creation and discussion of net art, what we
are building differs significantly from them, or indeed anything that currently exists, and will
therefore supplement rather than replace existing services. up until now, GIFs and HTML
installations have been scattered across the internet, found on disparate tumblrs and
personal sites, but there's no easy or efficient way to browse, view, curate and comment
on work. hyperplex will solve these issues with a broad and elegant approach that I will
outline in detail in subsequent paragraphs.

formats
hyperplex will aggregate, host, display and organize web-based artworks of any format,
from works represented by a single file to those distributed across many. due to the
complexity involved in finding a common paradigm through which to present works of
differing format, hyperplex will launch with support for the two forms through which net art
was born: animated GIFs and website installations. support for new formats will be aligned
with demand on an ongoing basis.
hyperplex.net!

automation
hyperplex is backed by a social graph crawler, designed & programmed from the ground
up toward the purpose of providing users with a realtime stream of relevant content. it
achieves this through an intermediate graph constructed from posts, likes and friend/follow
connections on Twitter, Facebook, tumblr, dump.fm and delicious. human feedback
mechanisms determine the expansion paths of this graph and the regularity with which
specific regions are update. always complete and up-to-date, this stream makes hyperplex
the ideal palette from which to curate. works aggregated by hyperplex from external
domains are treated by the backend in the same way as those uploaded directly from the
site itself; for the artist, therefore, sites like Facebook and Twitter can effectively serve as
alternate interfaces to hyperplex.

categorization
were making an ongoing effort to organize the work on hyperplex so that browsing feels
natural and filtering is intuitive. this happens at multiple levels:
- user galleries & tags;
- objective metadata/criteria (feature descriptors, color analysis);
- source context (social groups, popularity).
automated systems based on these criteria allow us to remove duplicates quickly and
identify remixed works.

the interface
the hyperplex interface is grayscale and minimalist; its designed to be both intuitive and
visually subtle in order to naturally focus user attention on art. central to browsing and
navigation on hyperplex is our nodal search system, which makes powerful database
search queries available to all users in an intuitive way. a single directed, autocompleted
search box allows filtering based on the criteria described in categorization, the source of
the work, popularity, keywords and so on. any number or combination of nodes - i.e.
search criteria - can thus be used. were working on similar node suggestion features in
order to help users find works that suit their taste.

hyperplex.net!

screenshots
the main page (a collection of featured images):

search (for works originally posted by vokoda on dump.fm):

hyperplex.net!

a gallery:

the image landing page:

hyperplex.net!

release schedule
the first public version of hyperplex will launch on June 1st at 1200 EST, with support for all
the features outlined in this document with a few exceptions:
- no objective categorisation;
- reduced website installation support;
- experimental ranking algorithms.
these will be completed and rolled out over June.

future plans
our priorities for rolling updates to hyperplex in the near future are:
- the expansion of available display options beyond simple grid view;
- making browsing and art discovery as intuitive as possible.

funding
from a technical point of view hyperplex is very close to completion. were attempting to
collect $1000 in early funding through our kickstarter page; this will be used to pay
Amazon EC2 hosting and bandwidth costs, which due to the number of artworks we store
and process and the complexity of our social graph crawler, are significant. any help you
can provide in this area would therefore be greatly appreciated. hyperplex is an entirely
non-commercial project and will remain it for the foreseeable future.

contact us
press@hyperplex.net

hyperplex.net!