To quote Robert Markley, this project has become something of my own "meta- discourse" on chaos.
welcome to my meta.
While Markley was referring to the Newtonian quest to define a mathematical or scientific basis for chaos, his description conveniently also describes any variety of human attempts to render the disorderly universe coherent—scientific, religious, or otherwise. Thus, the closer my project came to completion, the more I realized it was not only an attempt to order a jumble of excerpts taken from numerous sources into a coherent argument, but an attempt in itself to “order the universe.” The irony in this became especially apparent as I sat on my bedroom floor attempting to impose an order of my own on a mess of passages that also happened to describe human attempts to order chaos. Thus, I believe this hypertext works perfectly as a “discontinuous narrative” that is “both generated by and transcends a variety of competing historical utterances”—with the excerpts serving as a wide representation of “competing historical utterances.”
Although my project has evolved considerably since I first proposed it in an initial and vague version, it has somehow managed to preserve certain themes that have captivated me about our readings throughout the semester Namely, what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call the “contradictory imperatives for immediacy and hypermediacy.” In other words,
the perceived materiality or immateriality of different media forms, and the human desire for immediacy to information that, ironically, is usually sought through the remediation or hyper-mediation of new media forms
I believe that the greater immediacy to information supplied by new media has fostered both a desire for and paranoia surrounding the idea that materiality might be something we have to overcome. In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles describes this idea as one that privileges “information patterns over material instantiation”—the very same idea that has allowed phrases such as “Beam me up, Scotty!” to permeate popular culture.
For my project, I wanted to explore the opposite view—one that privileges materiality over immateriality—and inquires into why we desire immediacy to something we don’t seem equipped to understand except metaphorically. So I began with an exploration of information, which brought me to chaos and order, which in turn brought me to the material chaos of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. More than anything, my project has become a melting pot of scientific, literary, and religious explanations, or “stories,” about what I’m calling the overarching “human desire”—one that began in my mind as a desire for immediacy and has gone full circle to include the basic human drive to order the universe. Or, in Milton’s words that also serve as te title of my hypertext, the desire to “justify the ways of God to men.”
site design
As the materiality or perceived materiality of information is an important component of my project, I drew much inspiration from a concept elaborated by N. Katherine Hayles in her book Writing Machines. According to Hayles, a “technotext” is a literary work that “interrogates the inscription technology that produces it,” or “mobilizes reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence.” I wanted to incorporate this idea into the design of my hypertext in the same way that designer Anne Burdick incorporated the concept into the design of Writing Machines itself.
With this goal in mind, I decided to play with the way I displayed the excerpts from my various sources, all the while keeping in mind the fact that I was remediating these sources into an online form. Thus, justify is made up of several different types of pages with three major navigation structures. The main body of the hypertext takes the form of “text” pages, or short excerpts from the various sources I selected for the project. Although every text page is made up of an excerpt from an outside source, the text pages read together tell my story. The hypertext begins with a quotation by Galileo that perfectly captures what I wanted to be the tone of the entire hypertext—one of futility for thinking that humans would ever be able to comprehend the nature of order and chaos without imposing on it human metaphors.
To signal to the user what type of text the excerpt is from (if it is not immediately discernable from its content), I arranged all the excerpts into groups corresponding to a specific CSS. I used a total of three style sheets: a “literary CSS,” a “biblical CSS,” and a “scientific CSS.” Each style sheet specifies a certain font depending on whether it is literary, biblical, or scientific—I attempted to make the text fonts typical of whatever type of source they were from, but the links are just the opposite. In “biblical CSS,” for instance, Times New Roman denotes normal text and Courier denotes links. Texts and links within the text vary in shades of gray; the lightest gray is reserved for the text itself, bold gray is used for links that take the user to “chaos” pages, and the bolded black links take the user to the next page within my “story,” or ordered version, of the hypertext.
order / chaos
On the bottom of every text page are the words “order / chaos,” linked to the “order” page and the “chaos” page, respectively. As the user has to scroll down in order to see these links, my intent was for the user not to notice the “order / chaos” option until a little way into reading the hypertext. Once the user notices the “order / chaos” links are there, she will realize they are an option available on every text page. These links can be read in multiple ways: as a command to the user to make her own attempt to “order chaos,” as another two lenses through which to read the hypertext, or as the only option for clicking away from the text pages.
The “order” page, or the page featuring an image map of a bookshelf, is the most Ordered version of the hypertext. Conveniently, it also functions as its own bibliography. Also, perusing the order page is the only way one can actually find out from where the various passages were taken, as I did not include citation information within the text pages (to create an artificial unified voice). On a higher level, the books are all different “stories” man has come up with to sense of his place within the world—like Bacon’s “Book of Nature” and “Book of Science,” they represent the different “books” of the universe. Although I did not use all of them, the collection of titles as a whole gives a sense of what I was thinking about while selecting texts.
The “chaos” page is my favorite, and was the most time-consuming to create. Unlike the order page that one navigates according to books, the chaos page can be navigated according to ideas. Every idea corresponds to an image that attempts to capture that idea visually, and in turn the image pages (“chaos pages”) include randomized links to every text page that discuses that idea. I might bit off more than I could chew with this one, since chaos pages are extremely difficult to edit after the addition of more content to the project.
my story
The order I attempted to impose upon the text pages took me the longest to accomplish out of any of my other navigation structures, and thus I procrastinated it until as late as possible. My roommate probably did not appreciate chaos laid out on my floor so long, but Ordering Chaos was apparently something I felt the need to avoid at all costs. Humorously enough, the order I did end up imposing on the texts was essentially one of the “fall of man”—with the biblical fall setting up the structure of the argument and the scientific and literary texts providing ripe examples. The hypertext ends in a passage from Milton:
Him who disobeys
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place
Ordained without redemption, without end.
This excerpt fit perfectly into the end of my project, since it exemplifies the ceaseless desire of man for knowledge that caused his expulsion from Eden. The same futile desire, I attempted to show through my bizarre variety of texts, is apparent in our never-ending quest for information, and for information technologies that bring us closer to it.
Bolter, Jay and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. 5.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von. Faust. Trans. David Constantine. London: Penguin Books, 2005. 43-117.
Haught, John. “Can Religion Be Reconciled With Science?” Understanding Complexity. Ed. Gillian Ragsdell and Jennifer Wilby. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001. 119-124.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 1-49.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 25.
Holy Bible: King James Version. U.S.: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1990.
Markley, Robert. “Representing Order: Natural Philosophy, Mathematics, and Theology in the Newtonian Revolution.” Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 125-144.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost . Ed. John Leonard. London: Penguin Books, 2000. 3-6, 113-117, 286-288.
Sayre, K.M. “Philosophy and Cybernetics.” Introduction. Philosophy and Cybernetics. Ed. Frederick J. Crosson and Kenneth M. Sayre. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 3-29.
(all images that were not my own were found on Google ImageSearch and have been modified in Photoshop)
www.illusionsgallery.com/Creation-hands.html
df12.blogspot.com/
www.dkimages.com/.../Sliced-Bread-27.html
groups.google.ki/.../msg/3630f06dcc74b39b
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www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/baldung/adam-eve/
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abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec04.html
www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0514a.html
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times.kaist.ac.kr/.../jhs1-288/eindex.html
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http://satyavrat.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/math.gif
http://www.b-g.k12.ky.us/newwebsite1/images/Apple-Logo.gif
http://www.nwo.nl/images.nsf/pages/NWOP_5TFMN6/$file/Thema4CognGedr.jpg
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