Thursday, February 7, 2008

overwhelmed by the patches

for some reason my mac was having an issue posting, I was forced to use a pc...

I was wondering what exactly the connection between the Memex and Patchwork Girl is? Are hypertexts an attempt of forming associative links between pieces of information such as Patchwork Girl and its many sources? Hypertext is a cross referencing system, drawing connections between different texts. I felt while experiencing Patchwork Girl I was forced to draw more associations myself than the program did for me. For the first 15 minutes I was struggling to understand how one text related to another, or in what order they made sense. We have the map laid out for us, we can see where the texts fall in the grand scheme, however there were times when some just got lost in the chaos.

The Memex is a form of storing information, and mimics the ability of the human mind to make associations between pieces of information. Is this what Patchwork Girl is trying to do? Is Patchwork Girl trying to cut down on repetitive texts? I feel it is doing the opposite, I feel it is using the repetition to drive a point home. There was no real narrative quality to Patchwork Girl, it was all just a bit muddled and overwhelming to me. Each reader is going to have a different experience; each time you read it you create it. There is no set path through the program and the texts. Patchwork Girl is a patchwork, the dotted lines aren’t connecting the pieces for me, and everything seems to be disjointed and askew. Where is Bush’s Memex to come rescue me from my association issues? I feel that the order of the Patchwork Girl is maybe one person’s response to the numerous texts, but like I said, Patchwork Girl is going to be different for each reader.

1 comment:

Shane Farrell said...

you were having the same problem as me. instead of using cut and paste, highlight the text and drag it into the response box. a green plus sign will appear. let go and it will paste properly into the response box.