The second in a series of 10-minute puppet-videos chronicling the misadventures and frustrations of an ordinary (but rather hirsute) General Practitioner called Dr Hairy. In this one, Dr Hairy attempts to help a patient of his who has accidentally incurred some private charges - with hilarious results!

To view it on my site, go to http://www.edwardpicot.com/drhairy/privatecharges.mov ; or you can see it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2gqXN6rhPw .

Other items of interest (apologies if you've seen any of these already):

The Lost Shoe (http://www.sporkworld.org/Deed/lostshoe.mov): This was originally designed as a trailer for a book of poems, and the masterstroke is that it doesn't attempt to present any of the poetry in video form, but introduces us instead to the thematic territory of the collection. It's about parents who commit terrible acts of violence on members of their own family, and it's extremely strong stuff. Combines a vicelike sense of artistic control and restrained fury with a scorchingly ironic take on the US justice system.

I Love You (http://arteonline.arq.br/she/): From the Brazilian artist Regina Pinto, this is a short piece about feminine beauty. It's extremely accomplished riff on female icons: glossy and glamorous, nostalgic but not drippy, with design values reminiscent of Art Deco and pre-war Hollywood, and just a hint of feminist subversion here and there.

AlphaAlpha, an animated notebook of letters (http://arteonline.arq.br/a/): Again from the Brazilian artist Regina Pinto, this is a collection of 366 pictorial variations on the letter A (one for each day of the year, plus one for the leap-year), contributed by various different artists from all over the world (myself included) and put together, with music and animations, by Regina. The end result is simply eye-popping. There's some really extraordinary stuff in here: you can lose yourself in it for hours.

Cleikit (http://cleikit.com/): Another collaborative work, this is a spinoff from Peter McCarey's monumental "The Syllabary" (http://www.thesyllabary.com/), which has long been one of my favourite works of hyperliterature. "The Syllabary" is McCarey's attempt to write a poem for every single-syllable word in the Scots/English language, and "Cleikit" is an attempt to get other people to have a go at the same thing. If you feel like trying yourself, there's an e-mail by which you can contact McCarey and offer your services. In the meantime, although mostly empty, "Cleikit" (a Scots dialect-word meaning "grabbed") is worth a visit as a new media sound poem in its own right, automated and randomised, exploring the hundreds of single-syllable words in the language: it's a quite hypnotic experience.

The Gateless Gate (http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/weishaus/Gate-R/Cover-R.htm): Joel Weishaus's work is very much at the low-profile literary end of the hyperliterature spectrum, and "The Gateless Gate" is one of his most low-tech and literary projects to date - no animated images, no pop-ups on mouseover, no sound-effects, no words or images floating around the page. It takes the form of a sequence of "double-page spreads": in each case, a "page" of text is displayed opposite a "full-page" image. The simplicity of the schema perhaps masks the fact that this is a tour-de-force of HTML design: many of the full-page images are stunning, layered photographic "palimpsests", as Weishaus calls them, luminous and symbolic, and often suggesting prehistoric daubings on rock or bark. The text shows the same concern with prehistory and nature, not to mention layering: it blends philosophy, poetry, erudition, dream-fragments and autobiography into something which is both difficult to grasp and profound in its cumulative effect. You have to read quite a bit of Weishaus before you start to "get" him, but it's well worth the effort. There's nobody else like him.

- Edward Picot
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange