Conception and realisation: Fortner Anderson and Henry See
Hypertalk coding: Henry See
Produced: 1988
The Odyssey Project was an itinerant database built in Hypercard within a Classic MAC operating system. (Hypercard was an Apple-based hypermedia development system predating the World Wide Web.)
The Odyssey Project was uploaded using a 300 baud acoustic modem to a number of online systems such as I. P. Sharp, GEnie, Compuserve as well as numerous BBSs (Bulletin Board System) in Canada and the United States. Users who learned of the project were asked to download the stand-alone software, add material to it, such as texts, graphics and audio, and then pass it along to other users.
Three months after its release, a dialogue box appeared when the program was opened asking that users to return a copy to Montreal.
The project garnered numerous responses from users in North America and Europe. I’ll post screen captures of the project when I figure out how to access, to port and translate its data for contemporary software and hardware.
For more information about early narrative-based global communication projects see:
http://www.narrabase.net/dene_grigar.html
https://www.kunstforum.de/artikel/telecomputing-und-die-digitale-kultur/
https://textinart.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/emerson-lori_-robertson-benjamin-j-_-ryan-marie-laure-the-johns-hopkins-guide-to-digital-media-2014-johns-hopkins-university-press.pdf
https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/malloyjudy/
https://people.well.com/user/couey/interactive/see.html