Ilinx

Ilinx is a browser-based explorable hypertextual space and a patchwork of electronic literature gathering in a continuum different projects and texts on the relation between language and representation, reality and fiction, humans and computers, through the lens of subjective experience. Ilinx represent a personal quest to develop a platform connecting the paths of my research of knowledge and resulting in a conception of software as an hyperstitional zone where new worlds can be designed augmenting consciousness and affecting the physical world.

The concept of language maze developed in my thesis, and referring to Giorgio Colli research on the origin of philosophy in the myth of the labyrinth, becomes the fundamental structure and its relation to the users exploring Ilinx, its theoretical conclusion.

A "language maze" made of verbal and non-verbal languages, natural languages and formal languages, computer's code and machine languages. A Deadalus' labyrinth of material, informational, algorithmic and literary explorable spaces developing in the horizontal and the vertical direction, from microscopic to macroscopic territories, internal external and internal spheres. A Penelope's web made of rooms that, as Escherian paintings, hides recursive simulations and emulations of other rooms, other mazes and itself. Perhaps, what distinguishes the human from the machinic, is the feeling, illusory or real, of being whole with the "language maze" as an infinite space (logos) where to build new worlds from scratch. - Tancredi Di Giovanni

The Labyrinth is presented, then, as a human creation, a creation of the artist and of the inventor, of the man of knowledge, of the Apollonian individual, yet in the service of Dionysus the animal-god. - Giorgio Colli, 'The birth of philosophy' (1975)

The projects and texts that will become the nodes of ilinx's language maze, expands beyond the browser into the layers of code (HTML, CSS, JS), and are interwoven through quasi-consistent pieces of narrative, fragments of different stories spanning between history and myth, theory and fiction, fantasy and science-fiction, following the definition of ilinx developed by Roger Callois.

[Ilinx are games] based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness. - Roger Caillois, 'Man, Play and Games' (1958)

Islands

• Lemuria
• Thule
• Mu
• Hyperborea

References

• Myst
• Colossal Cave Adventure / Zorg
• Rouge-like games

• ELIZA
• Clippy

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© Natural-born infected