Tag Archives: nonlinear

Collage on Readings

Here are some ideas from the week 8 readings:week 8 reading collage1

“MY PART IN THIS STORY BEGAN, AS MANY STORIES DO, MORE OR less by accident, in a small town in upstate New York called Ithaca. And a place named after the mythical home of Odysseus is, I suppose, as good a place to begin a story as any. Back then, however, the only Odysseus I knew was a small cricket, who along with his brothers Prometheus and Hercules was part of an experiment I was running as a graduate student at Cornell University with my adviser, Steven Strogatz. Steve is a mathematician, but pretty early on in his career he started to become much more interested in the applications of mathematics to problems in biology, physics, and even sociology than in the math itself.”

In one of his paragraphs, Duncan J Watts demonstrated, with subtlety, an example of social networks. The end of his previous sentences is directly connected to the start of the next, hinting at the six degrees of connection. He also describes his involvement in the story as an ‘accident’. Knowing now that there is no such thing as random network or accidents, Watts choice of words plays cleverly on the very nature of networks.

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In the most ‘creative’ way, I chose to use this symbol to represent how I felt about David Shield’s “Collage” text. The letter ‘a’ is situated within the circle, but it is also a part of the circle. Each fragment within the collage are individual identifiable parts that are also an indispensable contribution to the collage’s concept.

Usually, in our writing and reading, we communicate through making logical points, sequentially setting up our arguments, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. But in the “Collage” extract – ideas, notes, observations, arguments etc. are piled in an archival collage. Structure and logic has been temporarily abandoned by the author. In turn, the ‘visitor’ must experience each fragment individually, before assembling, in a reflective process, the logic or argument of the overall picture. This is an inspiring work and a beautiful and fascinating  experience because, like Zen meditation, thought and judgement is suspended during the experience while the participant discovers every piece of the puzzle. And it is not only about the non-linear structure it created, but there is also a duality presented in this experience: one has to focus on the individual fragments while, at the same time, acknowledging the collective body that it is a part of.