Narrative Ecologies: A Living Landscape Between Hyper and Deep Attention?

In response to Hayles, Ed Folsom discusses the interplay of narrative and database, noting that the most powerful narratives become like databases in themselves, their plethora of meanings and throughways—like the Garden of Forking Paths—always exceeding any singular account/interpretation. Notably, Hayles positions narrative as a potential “common ground between hyper and deep attention” (197).  If…

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The Garden of Forking Pasts

I am not sure what “The Garden of Forking Paths” is trying to accomplish, but I am interested in the contrasting views it seems to provide on our future and past. The narrator offers this advice to “soldiers and bandits,” “Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should…

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Abstract art of convoluted elements that represent multiple realities.

Get Used to It: We are All Characters in a Hyperspace of Possibilities

To begin with, reading Borges (2018) was quite nostalgic; it brought back memories of literary criticism, the necessity of thematic coding, and events that come to life in your mind. Now, I nearly feel confident in predicting that whoever wrote the script for The Flash (2023) got some inspiration from this short story and its…

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Dizzily Growing Network

Dizzily Growing Network

Reading Borges in the past, I remember regarding the infinite permutations of “garden”-pathing, forecasting hypertext, abundant, wonderful, and inviting. But this time, the fourth? or fifth?, a Friday afternoon in late August, am struck by the inexhaustible and therefore exhausting (for mortal humans) infinitude. A garden does not plant, nor water, nor curate itself. The…

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