_Elastic Charles

In 1988, filmmaker Glorianna Davenport was running her Workshop in Elastic Movie Time for students at the MIT Media Lab. Out of the group’s collaboration was born Elastic Charles, an interactive video experience of Boston’s Charles River.

Viewers could add text and graphics to video content or edit and add additional video. These interactive tools were developed by one of Davenport’s graduate students. Building off the standard of hypertext, they sought to create a form of “hypermedia” in which visual aspects of a story could be linked in a system ripe for exploration by the viewer.