video web log [-\\/] video blog

28.1.01 melbourne

timelines (The consideration of hypertext structure as consisting of 'whole' syntagmatic series, which in turn become the paradigmatic sets available, has a series of complex implications which require further research.)

any program that thinks or wants to let you write multilinear content, and uses a timeline, think again.

timelines, even if we don't think they do, have a beginning, a middle, and, you guessed it, an end. a teleology of closure and completion that always resides at the same location. not always at the same time. but always at the same place.

on paper this is always, unless we're poets, somewhere around the last full stop. paper does this for us. its nice and flat. linear. to write against this flatness, you can do it, but its not multilinear. its concrete poetry, or fragments, or a diary, or episodic, or iterative, or. well, you get the idea.

if you have an end, a time that is the end, it is very hard not to think of that as the end. as a conclusion. closure. resolution. even where it might be plural or open or ambiguous. (plurality, openness, ambiguity can only remain conditions by virtue of an end.)

it is strange that environments that are for writing multilinear content rely so strongly on linear metaphors and though our stories might still need a teleology, it should not be derived from traversing the path and finding the terminal point.

this is why i fell in love with storyspace. small program. only words. (and i mean only words, you can put pictures, sounds, movies into it, but as far as the words go, choose a font, some rather crude formatting, and that's it.) no timeline. no middle or end. hard to avoid beginnings but its easy to start in the middle in storyspace. or fake it.

same applies to links. links, in storyspace, are omnipresent. not only letters, words, or phrases. but nodes. not singular but multiple. not just pseudo-neutral operators in a constant state of expectation but subject to true, false, if, then, or, not operators.

think about it. a link that is defined by negation.

a link that has 6 destinations.

most people don't 'get' storyspace. it may be a left brain, right brain, kind of thing. i'm not sure. but it has no timeline, and represents multilinear structure graphically, not as a stage. as blobs which contain whatever events you put in them, with no hierarchy except those formed by contingencies. and links where ever you want to make them, to where ever.

this visualisation in space defamialiarises narrative and sequence, spatiality redefines sequence no longer as causal progression but as quantities and qualities of relation.

this is why storyspace remains the environment where, perhaps, the most complex multilinear narratives written were formed. not because they're words (i write with video in storyspace), not because it is easy to link in storyspace, but because there's no timeline. no assumption of first. no assumption of middle (well, perhaps to the extent that it's only ever middle). and no hardcoded need for an end.

when the apparatus of writing has no need for closure we need to relearn how to write. or pretend that we have already learnt.

the question that these vogs ask is where narrative, rather than description, might be found in such spaces. (Balcom, Sawhney and Tolva were onto something [hypervideo].)