Hyperland

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Tom Baker plays a "software agent," whose appearance can be manipulated by Douglas Adams. Here, Adams (temporarily) configures Tom to look like a stereotypical Neanderthal.
Tom Baker plays a "software agent," whose appearance can be manipulated by Douglas Adams. Here, Adams (temporarily) configures Tom to look like a stereotypical Neanderthal.
Adams navigates through the interviews and explanations in the documentary using animated icons. Playback controls shown in the bottom right corner during each interview convey an additional sense of interactivity.
Adams navigates through the interviews and explanations in the documentary using animated icons. Playback controls shown in the bottom right corner during each interview convey an additional sense of interactivity.

Hyperland is a 50 minute long documentary film about hypertext and surrounding technologies written by Douglas Adams and produced by BBC Two in 1990. It stars Douglas Adams as a computer user and Tom Baker, with whom Adams already had worked on Doctor Who, as a software agent.

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The self proclaimed "fantasy documentary" begins with a shot of Douglas Adams asleep by the fire side with his television still running. In a dream Adams, fed up by game shows, commercial and generally non-interactive linear content, takes his TV to a garbage dump, where he meets Tom, played by Tom Baker, a software agent that shows him the future of TV: Interactive Multimedia.

Much like Apple Computer's Knowledge Navigator concept, Tom acts as a butler within a virtual space populated with hypertext, sound, pictures and movies represented by animated icons. The documentary is centered on Adams browsing these media and discovering their interconnectedness, leading him for example from the topic Atlantic Ocean to literature about the sea to Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the poem Kubla Khan by the same author to Xanadu and back to the topic of hypertext via Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu.

While Adams is browsing, many people and projects related to the general theme of hypertext and multimedia are presented:

The dream (and the documentary) ends with a vision of how information is accessed in 2005, that bears some resemblance to virtual reality scenes seen in the film The Lawnmower Man two years after Hyperland was produced. It can be argued that, apart from that graphical representation, the documentary draws a quite accurate vision of hypertext and how it is used today, especially considering that it predates the first Web browser.

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