Future Text Lab

00:05:09

5 October '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/10/06

The Future Text Lab session of 5 October 2026 had no set topic and seven participants, calling in from London, Delaware, Texas, Pristina and California; Mark Anderson was out with a cold. The newcomer was Kaveh Bazargan of River Valley Technologies. A physicist by training and one of the first TeX users at Imperial College, he started his business typesetting for IOP Publishing directly from authors' TeX files. He now works on fully automated XML-first publishing, where one structured file is the

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00:04:59

28 September '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/09/29

Two newcomers reshaped this session. Kathryn Jones, who describes herself as a non-academic with a passion project, has spent four years building what began as two hundred quote slides from Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind into an app she calls Insatiable Mind — a way of turning books, images and lived experiences into artifacts she can move through, so that a Caravaggio at the Met suddenly connects to a church she visited on the Appian Way. Art Domi, a Houdini technical artist from Kosovo,

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00:04:27

21 September '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/09/22

This was the first session after the ACM Hypertext conference, so it opened as a debrief. From there it moved through AI in education, AI-assisted development, document formats, and information access. Two newcomers joined partway through: an artist and publishing professional, and a participant arriving from other conferences. The group ended on a practical troubleshooting question. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/09/20/21-sept-26/

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00:04:47

7 September '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/09/08

One week to ACM Hypertext. Both of Frode's papers were rejected (he accepts the reviews; the work wasn't ready), so he's there for a demo only — "Tim Berners-Lee was also just doing a demo." ACM meeting tomorrow on official Origami Text EPUB versions of the proceedings; the committee has said yes in principle. Platform spread: Mac, visionOS (Apple reviewers couldn't open an EPUB this weekend — fixed), iOS imminent, Safari plugin, web reader at futuretextlab.info, Chrome plugin likely. No Lab call

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00:05:11

31 August '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/08/31

This session opened from a deliberately simple premise: AI is an external entity. When code is written with an AI in Xcode, the human is the designer or director, not the coder — and the same holds for knowledge work, where whatever the AI learns, writes, or researches goes into its mind, not ours. We are only augmented when something enters our own brain.Around that premise the group worked through two linked questions: how do we keep our brains engaged rather than outsourcing the thinking, and

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00:05:20

24 August '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/08/25

This session marked a shift from talking about tools to distributing them: the meeting opened with the group downloading and running a fresh macOS build of Origami Text, wrestling with Gatekeeper warnings, and confirming it launches — the first time the community has held the working software in hand together. Frode framed the context: a meeting with Marius of the ACM Hypertext community in Battersea has produced an "Advanced Documents Working Group" around Origami Text, aimed at the Hypertext

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00:04:50

17 August '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/08/17

This session combined three live demonstrations of new work with an unusually direct turn of self-examination: midway through, the host put a question to the group that it rarely asks explicitly — if this work succeeds, what is the end state?The answers, given in turn by every participant, form the most valuable record of the session and are reported in full below. Around them ran discussion arcs on AI as oracle versus partner, the ownership of knowledge objects, transparency as the basis of trust,

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00:04:37

16 August '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/08/16

The Week the Image Learned the Way Home```[Intro — spoken, low]Sunday to Sunday. Six repos deep.The week the image learned the way home.[Verse 1 — Interatlas]Stared at the ceiling of the sky —every naked-eye star and Andromeda drifting by,Ptolemy's forty-eight drawn in thin white lines,change your perspective and you change all the lines.All stars visible to the human eye,Then down — down through atmosphere and rain,rivers in the air, dust and smoke and pollution's stains,wind painted white at its

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00:04:29

11 August '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/08/11

The 11 August 2026 session of the Future Text Lab brought together Frode Hegland, Brandel Zachernuk (briefly, before a standing meeting), Tom Haymes, Benja Gooder, Astral_Druid, and Heiner Benking (listening in from a train). What began as a technical question — can the HTML model element live inside an EPUB — opened out into one of the group’s most philosophical sessions to date: a sustained exploration of perspective itself. Frode’s new star-field view in Interatlas, which shows how constellations

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00:03:13

3 August '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/08/03

This session combined three intertwined demonstrations with a wide-ranging discussion on spatializing knowledge. First-time participant Benja demonstrated a prototype writing tool that visualizes deeply nested parenthetical clauses as stacked layers, addressing working-memory limits in complex prose. This was followed by a Game of Life knowledge-sculpture prototype for visionOS and a demonstration of a live Earth-and-space environment featuring real-time satellites, extrudable terrain, and the

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00:04:04

27 July '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/07/27

The session opened with a live walkthrough of building, running and notarising a native application by conversing with Claude inside Xcode, followed by a demonstration of an existing globe and solar-system app on Vision Pro, and then turned into a sustained inquiry into what a personal knowledge space should actually contain and how its contents should behave once they are in space. Much of the conversation circled one question put to everyone in turn — what are the things you would want to hold,

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00:03:35

21 July '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/07/22

The session centered on how conversational coding inside a native development environment has collapsed the cost and effort of making bespoke software, letting non-programmers prototype working tools for their own letters, notes, and knowledge simply by writing prose — and on what that means for a community of text and hypertext researchers who want to exchange knowledge freely. Around live demonstrations of rapidly built apps (a messaging-and-notes tool, glossary and connection views, an

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00:03:43

13 July '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/07/13

This session centered on a live demonstration of Origami Text, a peer-to-peer communication experiment in which each message is a self-describing, plain-text JSON file carrying Visual-Meta-style metadata, built almost through conversational "vibe coding" with Claude acting as a client inside Xcode. The host argued that the threshold for creating serious, robust applications has collapsed to a few hundred pounds of tokens, turning software itself into "wet clay" the community can reshape

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00:03:46

6 July '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/07/07

This session explored what the fundamental elements of a spatial knowledge environment should be, launched by an AI-assisted inquiry into neuroscience and psychology which concluded that connections, not objects, are the primary units of thought. The conversation wove through the reconstructive nature of memory, the failure of education systems to teach thinking rather than conformity, a sustained debate over whether original ideas exist, the problem of provenance and intellectual property for

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00:04:43

29 June '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/06/29

This session carried the month's figure-and-ground theme into a concrete new use case, prompted by a first-time participant from the world of corporate law: the headset as a space for contested negotiation and dispute resolution. The working premise, carried over from the previous week, is that what distinguishes headset work is not "knowledge work" but contested synthesis — holding a quantity of not-yet-structured material in space and arguing it into shape. Around that spine the group examined

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00:03:39

22 June '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/06/29

This session deepened the group’s figure-and-ground thread into a genuine reframing: the difficulty of showing relationships in a 360-degree knowledge space is not a problem of where to route a connective line, but a problem of signification — of how out-of-view information can keep doing the work that knowledge-in-the-world is supposed to do. Drawing on Don Norman’s affordances and signifiers, Donella Meadows’ systems thinking, and the founding choices of hypertext, the conversation worked through

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00:03:48

15 June '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/06/23

This session continued the month's theme of figure and ground applied to reading and thinking in XR: when potentially every digital document is available at once, how do we decide what to bring forward and what to leave as background? Using a long, heavily structured online essay as a shared test case, the group worked across three registers at once — the practical question of how such a piece might be re-presented spatially, the physiological limits of human reading, and the deeper conceptual

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00:03:00

8 June '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/06/08

This wide-ranging session, held in the hours before Apple‘s Worldwide Developer Conference, circled around a single underlying question: what is the right relationship between a person, their knowledge, and a designed space — physical or in XR. Conversation moved fluidly between flow states and active engagement, the perceptual default of the human visual system, contested histories and multiple narratives, immersive environments as persuasive “atmospheres,” and the craft of guiding rather than

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00:00:56

1 June '26

Future Text Lab ·

2026/06/08

This session, framed around the theme of "figure and ground" (document versus workspace), explored how authoring in spatial computing should handle the vast surrounding context — references, notes, citations, and AI-generated material — that informs a piece of writing but never fully enters the final product. The conversation moved through the history of information artifacts (from cuneiform clay bulla to Warburg's wall panels to Robert Caro's articles on the wall), the physical and perceptual

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00:03:03

Thinking Music

Future Text Lab ·

2026/05/26

Introduction to the Thinking Music aspect of The Future Text Lab.

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