Readings and Symbols

In the readings, Laurel, Deleuze/Guattari, and Ascott each provide wonderful metaphors for their technological topics at hand. In Computers as Theatre, Brenda Laural relates computers to the performance arts such as plays. She notes that computer users compare to the audience of a theatrical performance in the sense that both influence the outcome of action within the medium. She also plays with the idea of art and computers as representational, because they are notably different than what is being emulated from real life of the imagination. Similarly, in From a Thousand Platuaus, Deleuze and Guattari metaphorically represents the internet with the rhizome. The internet is like an enormous underground network of interconnected computers, which are symbolized by the nodes on the edges of the roots. With proper nurturing, the rhizome can expand indefinitely just as the internet constantly grows and improves with new websites. Likewise, in Ascott’s piece The Construction of Change, Roy Ascott explains that “cybernetics is integrative.” Here he speaks of cybernetics as study which combines many distinct sciences together, and provides a wonderful study for the vibrant mind of an artist. Here cybernetics can be tied back to the rhizomatic metaphor of the internet because it interacts with a network of fields which elicit changes in human conditions, similar to the internet’s social networks. Undoubtedly, the three authors provide powerful metaphors which are interwoven with one another.

Symbols: I envision history as a river because as we mentioned in class, history becomes history the more it is separated by time, just as a river becomes a river as it divides land with a stream of water. Also, history can be relatively unpredictable in the sense that it can be interpreted in different ways based on who has experienced it and how it has been recorded, and therefore can be subject to bias. Similarly, floating down a river, the speed and intensity of the water can alter rapidly and erratically.
I see time as an asteroid because of its relationship to time as both diachronic and synchronic. An asteroid could be diachronic if you look at it as something detached from its original body of land that travels in a linear motion through space. It could also be synchronic in the sense that it moves rapidly through space in an instantaneous manner, and can significantly alter the present if it collides with an inhabited planet such as earth.