Old New Media Icon

My New Media Icon is the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. 

I discovered his literary works when I was 14 years old and since then he became one of my favorite writers. However beyond his talent as a writer, I have chosen him as my New Media Icon for his early vision and contribution to what we know today as the Internet.

Tribute to Old New Media

Hypertext – Cut-up

Both Hypertext and Cut-up are techniques used in several fields, mainly in the Literary field. However their influence as New Media- New Technologies should be acknowledge, hence my tribute to these techniques.

“El Jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” was Jorge Luis Borges first story translated into English as “The Garden of the Forking Paths”. This story was written in 1941 and within the story told, Borges defines the idea of a never-ending book and a never-ending labyrinth:

“In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses— simultaneously—all of them.”

This can be understood as a text that can lead the reader to all the texts and all stories. As early as 1941, Borges was shaping the idea of what we know today as the World Wide Web. And many authors have been influenced by this work both in the Literary and in the Technologic world.

On the other hand, Cut-up is a technique that consists in cutting up a text and put it back together in a random or aleatory way so that the resulting text is a new one.

My idea for this project is to mix both techniques, Hypertext and Cut-up, in order to create a Story Telling Structure that resembles the idea of a never ending tale by using a twisted loop where the first scene is the same as the last scene in which case it gives the reader the impression of continuity, but also presenting possibilities along the way to change the story by choosing a path. Also, I decided to use the lyrics of Radiohead's album Kid A to build the story because this album was written using the cut-up technique.