DIAGRAM 1.1 part 1_Whit Honea

DIAGRAM Issue 1.1

“…and since I know nothing of him I described her instead. It’s all relative” -from “Madness and Bubblegum” by Whit Honea

This excerpt from the inaugural issue of DIAGRAM is quite reminiscent of Anne Balsamo’s theories of how gender exhibits itself online (reference Balsamo’s Technologies of the Gendered Body, 1995). The topography of DIAGRAM, however, provides much more than mere insight into shifting identities.

The voices of DIAGRAM delve into a realm rich with flesh, technology, and discursive desire. Although the site employs various organic images, suggesting their importance as branding tools (see below illustration entitled “Bee-keeping for Beginners”), the design and navigation seem to play a lesser role than that of the text.

But what is it really about DIAGRAM that lends itself to an organismal sensibility? Anatomy and physiology were of course popular before the internet, but why the popularity of the flesh and antomical reasoning with this web literary publication (keeping in mind it’s been seen elsewhere)? Illustrations aside, what is it about navigation (the non-linear, non-sequential connection of ideas and informational alcoves) that suggests anatomy and/or physiology.

I am reminded of Jesse Jackson’s words: “If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.” In this case DIAGRAM is providing a motive. To be more like nature is to be closer to perfection (indeed to be perfect), because natural schemata are just that; the metaphorical images that illustrate DIAGRAM symbolize mathematical precision, invention, and scientific reasoning.

Perhaps the greatest challenge in proving (or disproving as it may be) the theory that societal discursive desires play a major role in shifting the style of electronic writing technology to a more organic locus (a conclusion that DIAGRAM seems to so effortlessly reinforce), is that discursive by nature is analytical and therefore relies on a close study of what was and is — in effect slowing the cognitive mechanism enough to predict needs and wants based on current material and non-material artifacts, including the commonplaces created from various metaphors found in art and literature. As this mechanism slows we are left with signatures of nature, as illustrated by the “ovaries of queen” seen in the illustration above. The symmetry’s symbolism could provoke an association as complex as positive vs. negative forces, or as simple as the left and right sides of the human brain. What artifacts/commonplaces do we see represented in literature and art? How did we get them? How do they affect us?

The difference between subconscious (instinctual) desire and its more analytical counterpart (the desire that combines sight, sound, and perception to make split-second decisions) seems to occupy a fine line. This is perhaps best illustrated when a user surfs the web, looks for information, or simply accesses a wide variety of information based on association alone. During internet searches users engage in what Roy Ascott calls the ”non-trivial” form of interactivity, in which an “open ended capacity to accommodate new variables” exists (Ascott, Glossary). This mentality users bring to web sessions they don’t necessarily have when they open the pages of a book or magazine, is a kind of mental preparedness that allows them to handle, indeed even predict (and therefore enjoy), the randomness of (cognitive) switches the World Wide Web offers through its non-linear/non-sequential display of information. Not only does this interactivity illustrate how “media constantly engage in a recursive dynamic of imitating each other, incorporating aspects of competing media into themselves while simultaneously flaunting the advantages their own forms of mediation offer” (Hayles, Writing Machines, 30), but we can also see how “materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning” (IBID, 33).

IT’S ALL RELATIVE

Consider the following quotes:

“I should also tell you that my name is Lyle, this may or may not be important to the story, but it is important to me…I also don’t know why I started with this story, other than I just wanted you to be aware that I know things about death and madness.”

“None of these things were true of course, but Dr. Franklin knew them, and he knew them about me. He knew similar things about Todd too.”

These quotes from “Madness and Bubblegum” by Whit Honea, featured in the first issue of DIAGRAM, demonstrate how truth online is relative. These statements, although they merely seem more like the inner thoughts of a quirky narrator (and indeed they are), are also metaphors on how truth online is built on perception only. Our senses are touched and subsequently controlled by convergent pixels and computer software programs, not the natural phenomena we experience when we hug a stranger, breathe in a rose’s perfume, or encounter pollutants or other gaseous and solid molecules. The only nature that carries from the corporeal to the virtual is human nature manifested in text, voice recordings, and manipulated moving or stationary images.

We only know the truth others tell us. Like the narrator who offered a series of non-truths to build his identity, so we are able to forge our identities with fractions of desire that cannot be manifested in the real world. Computers are allowing our organic tendencies, desires, fantasies to play themselves out, with virtually no commitment.

The author of “Madness and Bubblegum” comments on the piece: “What about the insecurities that some can never overcome? While television reminds us that we are not playing for the Yankees or touring with the Stones as we had always planned, the internet offers many a means of escape, but in the end they are held just as accountable. It was by comparing people with where they are to where they wish they were that I came up with the characters I did; which is to say that I don’t feel that I created any of them as much as showed a reflection of feelings that dwell in all of us.”

Now, how do the illustrations found in DIAGRAM 1.1 work hand-in-hand with the text to present the meaning Hayles refers to?

More text and illustrations next time…

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