Future Text Lab

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/

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 Monday 14 Sept. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/09/07/7-sept-26/

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 what are the right components — tags, annotations, sources, ideas — for building shapes or sculptures of knowledge? The middle of the session became a sustained, genuinely contested examination of tagging: as ordered semantic sequences, as frozen ontologies that trap the tagger in a past paradigm, as waypoints connecting to patterns, and as something AI may render irrelevant altogether. The final stretch turned concrete and collaborative, as a returning participant’s distributed, local-first hypertext system and the Origami Text EPUB effort agreed to attempt interoperability — shared annotations across independent systems, with sovereignty kept in the data itself — in time for the ACM Hypertext conference in two weeks.
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/08/31/31-aug-26/

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 Symposium in September. Origami Text was given its cleanest definition yet — an approach, not a brand: EPUBs that follow strict, plain visual guidelines (no frippery, because frippery breaks reader compatibility) while carrying a ton of metadata in the HTML and in JSON. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/08/24/24-august-26/

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, and whether document-centred workflows are being made obsolete by agentic, generative interfaces.
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/08/17/17-august-26/

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 true altitude,

whales tracked by species through the deep ocean blue.

SharePlay open — now the Earth's a shared room,

and every view got a name: Cite it. Link it. Resume.

[Verse 2 — Author]

Author got heavy, so we made it light —

no more TIFFs bloating the store overnight.

BibTeX riding out on every E-PUB train,

Google Books came back, retry on the line again.

Then Sunday — the big fold:

mobile moved in, one repo to hold,

pinch the text and it folds to outline clean,

Write, Outline, Map — one hand, one screen.

back on the iPhone back on the iPad this time more clean.

[Chorus — spoken, deliberate]

Copy the view from the turning Earth.

Copy with layers and levels intact.

Drop it in the writing where it proves its worth.

Export to Origami — folded, sealed, then shown —

and the reader taps the image... and the whole scene comes home.

Every layer. Every level. iPhone, Mac, or air.

The picture's not flat — it's a place, still there.

[Verse 3 — Knowledge Space rising]

And quietly, the center of gravity moved —

Knowledge Space stepping up, main-app groove.

Origami pages open where the notes reside,

Author's library folded in, shelves along the side.

Actions as a filter column at the list's right hand.

Not the Augmented Library carrying the weight no more —

the Space is the home now. That's what the week was for.

[Bridge — half-time, softer]

One loose thread on the workbench glows —

stretchtext expanding, but the commit never rose.

Tuesday's work still waiting in the queue...

Monday knows what Monday's gotta do.

[instrumental]

the Sunday cheated and got it done.

[instrumental]

And as an aside, a discussion on design, somewhere in Pontedera, an email sits unread —

a rougher kind of Vespa, drawn and freely given, nothing said.

No claim on it. Just: here — go build it instead.

[Chorus — repeat]

Copy the view from the turning Earth.

Drop it in the writing where it proves its worth.

Export to Origami — folded, sealed, then shown —

and the reader taps the image... and the whole scene comes home.

[Outro — spoken, fading]

Six projects. One loop closed.

The citation isn't text anymore.

It's a door.

```

[instrumental]

[spoken]

The Week the Image Learned the Way Home, we continue to connect we continue to think.

It might not sound poetic but knowledge is, at least to a large extent, about connections. It follows therefore that the substrates we use to hold our knowledge and the tools we use to interact with our knowledge, should extend connections. And with that, to bed!

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 dissolve into arbitrary shapes the moment you leave Earth’s vantage point, became the session’s governing metaphor, threading through Tom’s knowledge navigator and its resistance to imposed ontologies, Benja’s proposal for negotiated glossaries between two people in dialog, and Astral_Druid’s account of watching a gift economy in VRChat collapse into a zero-sum market game. The session closed with a declared direction: building a dialog system for people who actually want to make the world better.
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/08/11/11-aug-26/

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 ability to walk inside the planet's layers. The group then turned these demos toward a concrete challenge: designing a compelling spatial reading experience for the roughly thirty papers of the upcoming ACMHypertext Conference proceedings, which broadened into questions of annotation, curation, naming, and what a community's unit of published conversation should be.
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/08/03/3-august-26/

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, move and connect? — with answers ranging from books, artworks and works-in-process to overheard names, calendar entries, transcript fragments and thoughts had while walking. Running alongside were threads on perception, movement and attention as design constraints, on provenance and social annotation, and a more sober thread on what these tools cost and what still cannot be handed to them. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/07/22/27-july-26/

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 interactive globe, and a dimensional zzstructure navigator), the group heard a presentation reframing the purpose of information tools as "navigational systems" grounded in distributed cognition, explored peer-to-peer file sharing for the community, and debated what is genuinely new versus already well-trodden, and where AI relocates rather than removes intellectual work.
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/07/17/21-july-26-2/