I have been recording my ideas and putting them in a database. I believed that new ideas do not come out of the blue, but they often come from our old or ignored ideas, hence the importance of archiving ideas. By finding more connections between ideas, one is able to produce creative ideas. How can I archive so that I could find more connections between ideas consequently produce new ideas? This media artifact is an attempt to experiment with one way to archive, one structure to archive.
I call this media artifact a rearrangeable text, for the reason that in the same pool of paragraphs, the paragraphs are arranged differently each time the reader refreshes the website that presents this rearrangeable text. I have created a big web of interconnected ideas from my extensive triangulation research about sensibility, improvisation, bias, etc. It is possible to write a proper academic essay that puts forth all these ideas to a focus, to a thesis statement. However, such a reductionist approach will not present the entirety of the whole web. This viewpoint is addressed clearly in Bohmian dialogue, it claims that reductionist thinking is powerful in understanding isolated things, which such understanding could help creating new technologies, however “its efficacy hinges on its being able to fragment or isolate its subject matter. It fails and may become actively dysfunctional when confronted by wholes, by the need to understand and take effective action in a highly interdependent context.” (Bohm, 2004, p.xii ) Consequently, what I do is I have a web of ideas, and I was writing the paragraphs as I travel along with the map. Each time I loop back to the point where I started, I stopped, and one arrangement is complete. Then I pick another starting point and do the same thing. As I begin to write the third and fourth loop, I write less and less, because ideas are interconnected and the paragraphs have a reusable property that allows themselves to be arranged differently. The end result is a website where every time it presents one arrangement of the web. When one refreshes the webpage, it would present a different arrangement. The reader would start seeing how ideas are connected differently despite reading from the same pool of paragraphs. It is an archive of what I have been reading for the past 4 months. By selectively having the juxtaposition of a few ideas at the same time, it creates a dynamic archive in which it may reveal different ways of looking at the ideas, leading to the capacity of creating more connections between existing ideas.
I think refreshing the website at least 4 times would allow one to understand most connections of ideas that are encapsulated and embedded in this text. Furthermore, the beauty of this text is that it is as fragile as music ought to be. Derek Bailey, in On the Edge: Improvisation in Music, revealed that European music was originally created with intentions to be improvised, the music was meant to be played, not to be preserved. (Bailey, 1992, Ep.1) This fragility of music is always the root of playing music, thus it is impossible to hear two exactly identical concerts. There is always a possible surprise, no matter how good or bad it is, music is always unique.
Bailey, D. (1992). On the Edge: Improvisation in Music Ep1. [Video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edy2QlP_jaU&t=23s [Accessed 23 December 2019].
Bohm, D. (2004). On Dialogue. New York, NY: Routledge.