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Offsite Storage – Chemical Landscapes by Edward Falco (photograms by Mary Pinto, designed by Will Stauffer-Norris) is hosted entirely in the cloud. Although once it is viewed it is stored temporarily on the user’s computer, the ‘original’ copy is located on a web-server that exists outside of the singularity of the users computer. This allows the work to not only be accessed from anywhere that an internet connection is possible, but also allows for it to be loaded on multiple machines simultaneously.
Whereas print media must be mass produced, thus creating multiple hard links (destroying one book would not affect the reality of the other copies) elit can use symbolic linking to create references back to an original (but deleting the original would completely destroy any of those links). Every internet accessible work of elit moves from a simple link (which can be either a hyperlinked image or text) to another page (again, either media
Chemical Landscapes. Chemical Landscapes by Edward Falco (photograms by Mary Pinto, designed by Will Stauffer-Norris) is a work of electronic literature that begins with a ‘photogram’ that then leads the onlooker into a series of texts. These texts appear in a raw unadulterated form and a reflective lighter form. In this way the original page (simply a photogram) is an image that begets description. The photograms themselves are inspired by landscapes; they are the picture representation of a different image. The name of the work describes the process by which the work is created, but is also a description that leads to the image (a flashlight was used in a darkroom to expose certain parts of the work creating ‘chemical landscapes).
The entire work is hosted online, rather than locally on the user’s computer. As the user clicks on a portion of the home screen image a new page is delivered over the web. Each link then is symbolic in that if the material were removed from the site the link would be empty. Furthermore the links themselves summon up new pages and so lead from an image to a description in the way Calvino describes moving from an image to its description.
Biosonar Echolocation. Flying rodents, commonly referred to as ‘bats’ employ a wonderful ability that allows them so see without using their eyes. Bats can ‘see’ at night using echolocation. They emit a sound that echoes back to them after it hits a solid surface that doesn’t absorb the sound. The bats then analyze the quality of the echo to determine the size and distance of the object.
As an emblem the bat represents the ability to create an image from the abstract. Just as reading a book enables a reader to create an image from the text, so too does a bat’s interpretation of its echo enable it to create a comprehensive picture of its world.
Time Machine. No, not the book by H.G. Wells, the automatic backup process deployed on the Mac OS X Leopard operating system. Time Machine is a versatile little program that backs up your entire computer whenever you plug in an external drive designated for use with Time Machine. The application creates a carbon copy of the user’s entire hard drive copying each file, folder, preference list, hidden setting, etc. (which by proxy means that every 1 and 0 is copied as well).
Thus a Hard Drive (HD) with 99 Gb used of 160 Gb will create an initial copy on the external HD of 99 Gb. Now comes the magic. Suppose the user creates 2 files before the next back up, and suppose those files are 1Gb files each. That means that 2 Gb have been added to the total used space on the HD (101 Gb for those keeping track). Instead of copying over the entire HD onto the backup drive, Time Machine simply adds the 2 new files to the backup but also makes a fresh copy of all of the rest of the files. ‘What?!’ you may be screaming, but worry not, thanks to the wonders of multi-hard linking your external hard drive only contains 101 Gb of data. Hard linked files are not like soft (symbolic) linked files in that deleting the original file will not result in loosing that file. Whereas a soft linked file is basically a roadmap for the file, a hard linked file is a ghost like clone of the file. If there were two hard links to a file and the user deleted the first file, the hard link would still be the file (whereas deleting the file would render a soft link useless). Hard links are like the many heads of the mythical Hydra. Each head is the Hydra, but cutting one off does not fell the beast.
Confusing as all of this is it does actually tie in to Calvino in a somewhat circuitous way. Hard links are the objective truth of which Calvino speaks. They are the universal truth because each link is in reality the file. Symbolic (soft) links are the subjective truth; they rely on a file to have any validity and once that file is removed they loose meaning. Hard links are, in a sense, true no matter what; they are objectively true. Soft links are, in a sense, true dependent on the state of the file; they are subjectively true.
Visibility is the driving force behind a story. Calvino muses how an image may drive words to form itself into a reality, or how conversely words may shape an image. The imagination then is a link, but is it a symbolic link or a hard link? Does the imagination help us to know what is really there, to point us back to one original truth, or does it merely redirect us to a different thought entirely, one that is particular to our system of thoughts? Put another way, is the imagination the proof of the subjective truth, or of the objective truth?
Calvino himself struggles to pin visibility down admitting that sometimes he begins with an image and lets it carry him forwards (in a purely subjective way [that is to an image that he creates that is entirely personal and his own]) but prefers to think of imagination as a way to understand a larger, objective knowledge (not of his own understanding, but of a universal sort of trueness).
Literature then is both that which can point back to a past ‘authority or tradition’ but can also work as novum – a work that is novel to the point of forcing the reader to question authority and tradition (as used in Sci-Fi literature).
The Ties that Bind
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