Friday, November 12, 2010

From one to more than a thousand

complexity of rhizome

In A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the comparison between writing and botanical roots made me think that human thought process is like a tiny computer system. This idea of rhizome in writing and thinking is kind of beyond my ability to comprehend. However, it did form a image of how our thoughts keep twigging into more and more branches and finally form into a certain types of ideology though the article stated that it's different from ideology. That is how I perceive computer programing: thousands of files are actually the derivative result of one single parent file. In my opinion, this could be similar to all the derivative result of new media like Internet, Web sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs, and DVDs as stated in Lev Manovich's article New Media From Borges to HTML. Through the development of new media, it gradually forms into this new system of rhizome.

Enjoy this new media art installation

4 comments:

  1. I like the connection you made between rhizomes and computers. After reading the articles, it seemed important to reconsider how I thought about the unfolding of history and how various technologies came to be. The branching system is a more dynamic and apt way to think about these things, as opposed to the more conventional linear system (everything goes forward in a straight line).

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  2. Yeah you made some good connections between the rhizome concept and computers. These sorts of branching structures arise almost everywhere you look, whether it's your own thoughts, the inner workings of your computer, the branches of a tree, the confluence of a river system, the branching of biological evolution. It seems existence is made up of all of these interconnections.

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  3. The rhizome concept is like computers and the internet, but has the way the internet been mapped out detrimental towards ever becoming a "true rhizome"? I think Ted Nelson would argue for his Zenadu space being the true rhizome analogy.

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  4. Google making the web search-able seems like a step toward imposing linearity to the web. Tim Berner-Lee seemed to thing of it more or less like nodes branching toward other nodes much like associative thoughts might.

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