Thursday, November 20, 2008

Click Here to Start

Ok, so I know that this is may seem infantile and I know that this is coming from a non-theorist/newbie in general...but I really don't think that the chart is that hard to comprehend. After the discussion in class (and the more interesting one that happened out of class) I went back and read and re-read the section entitled America (On Civilization III). The more I read it, the more I came to understand that the Fig. C is a pictorial representation of the entire chapter, but not one that hides a deeper meaning depending on how you read it. I believe that in the paragraphs within America, Wark sets up exactly how he wants you to read and analize the chart. He starts off in [052] by defining the x-axis of the 'graph'. "History is a story and geography an image of this topography, in which the boundaries are forever being expanded and redrawn." Wark defines the x-axis as time and each column as a specifc medium that "opens toward certain [specific] possibilities". But media that have been transformed through time. Each medium allows for a certain outcomes but each is also the starting point for the next, chronologically.
"The world of possibility is the world internal to the algorithim. So: a passage, mediated by the novel, from the topic to the topographic; a passage, mediated by television, from the topographic to the topological; a passage, medited by the game, from the topological to as yet unknown spaces..."
Fig. C exists to show the progression of media through time but with examples to show the direct application. The levels mentioned in the chapter parallel the changing complexity of the media and the thought processes/questions needed to achieve that new medium. Life gets progressively more complicated as the once straight lines of the place then of the map are folded onto one another to create a new space. "The line makes topics, maps them into the topographic, then folds the topographic into a digital topology...At each level of the actual unfolding of the line across the world, it offers a glimpse of the virtual in its own image." The simplicity of the story and the line is lost to the complexity of the game. "The question of the form of the game cannot be separated from the question of the form of the world - of gamespace."

1 comment:

Becky, Sam, Merel, James, Adrienne, Asa said...

this way of thinking helps clarify things for me, so thank you.


-adrienne