OutPut

The ipermedial project "OutPut" is a consideration - at the same time critical and creative - about the beginning of personal computing. At that time, the event initially concerned the business field, strongly affecting the productive and organizational structures. Then it rapidly expanded also to the home field, further influencing social relationships and lifestyles, which became (from that time on) more and more digital.

The undisputed protagonist of that great revolution, carried out in the industrialized West during the eighties, was the Apple Macintosh, a personal computer that was able to concentrate in itself all the technological and conceptual aspirations of an entire epoch, so marking technologically and culturally also the ones that were going to come.
It is for this reason that, from a technical point of view, our work exploits a part of the huge developing potentialities of HyperCard, the first multimedia authoring software of information history, realized by Apple (and it is not a coincidence) already in 1987.

On the basis of the choice of this application there is, in fact, from our side a clear "philological" will - once again critical and creative - bound to demonstrate and to assess the still very actual expressive potentialities of hardware/software solutions that are the origin itself, logical and technical, of every current or future hypermedia project.

So we have decided to create an animated, surfable and hypertextual narrative path, which will be able to illustrate and translate, emotionally and conceptually, the professional world of "those days", so to say, a cultured world in its perspective mutation. 
In the carrying out of the visual side of our work we have decided to use a series of clipart included in the original package of HyperCard. They appear, to our contemporary eyes as much refined and essential as significant. In fact they still have an intact ability to recall, in an iconic and neat way, the declared or unaware "mental map" of an epoch: the one in which the IT was rising, bringing us a great load of purposeful confidence.
The original version of the work requires a Macintosh SE/30 with 4 MB of Ram and System 7.