In network media we discussed small world networks, dense nodes, and so on. A korsakow film is exactly this sort of structure. Below is something I wrote in 2011, reposting here as it should help you understand Korsakow film as an architecture and structure that you do things with, and an architecture and structure that is, in its very DNA, the same as the networks we are working on. It’s sort of a mise-en-abyme moment really.

A significant idea that has a lot of relevance for things like the internet, hypertext, and social media (which are all forms of distributed networks) is the idea of a ‘small world network’. This is related to the famous experiment by Stanley Milgram about there being a maximum of ‘six degrees of separation’ between any two people, anywhere in the world. A small world network assumes lots of a small number of connections between individuals (nodes, clips in a k-film, links on the web, people you know), but with a few individuals who have a lot of connections. In relation to social networks these links are not about how close you are to others (whether geographically or personally) just that you know them. The existence of only a small number of people who know a lot of other people (who have a lot of connections) makes it much easier to get from one group to another, from one individual to another. The key features here are that these connections (how many people you know) is not equally distributed – I know 100, you know 200 – and that to get from one individual to another you do not need to know all the connections, all you need to know is somebody that you think will be closer than you are.So, what does this have to do with k-films? Quite a lot, since keywords create (in k-film land) small world networks. Clusters or clouds of clips that all know about each other since they have common keywords. Now, imagine a work which has several such clouds. This is like a party where there are four, no let’s make it five, distinct groups of people who know each other. Now, to find someone in my group who knows someone in another group (in other words someone who could easily sit in one or more of the groups) is quite easy and this is how the two groups can be connected. The person I know in that group over there can introduce me to everyone else in their group – I just need one point of connection to be able to join them, it doesn’t matter that I only know one person.

Hence in my k-film with my clouds all I need to do is make sure I have one clip (node, SNU, pick your term) that has lots of connections to the other clouds. To keep my now rather dodgy analogy going, the person who knows someone in three, four or even five of the groups at my party. This node might have no limit to lives (it will keep appearing) and also have plenty of keywords so itn is a point of connection to all the other clouds and nodes.

In practice I might have most clips with limited lives. As I view the work I am caught in a cloud, but as I view material and clips ‘die’ this special node (what I’m currently calling a dense node) will appear. If I select this then because it has links to all the other clouds I can now get access to these other clouds. In this way I’m able to make sure that all the parts of my k-film can be connected. That’s one half of the problem. The other half is to figure out how to film or make this content in such a way that it makes sense, visually and contextuallly, so that it works as this dense node or hinge between these other parts. This depends very much on what these other clouds are about.

Need an example? I might have material that I have grouped (made as clouds) around night and day. I might then have to fllm something at dusk or sunset and use that as something that connects night and day and make this clip my connector. I might have inside and outside, light and dark, blue and red, and so on. In each case once I recognise what the terms of my structure are I can identify something that falls between them, and this is the one that I can use to join these two clusters or clouds together.