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"Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be." At first I didn’t have any clue about what I could do for my Cyberculture project; there are so many innovative technologies and concepts in this world that not only intrigue me but threaten to cause mental collapse with all the mind-boggling(i.e.Luke McClung's theory of energy and information) ideas they propose. For a while I wondered not only how I was going to choose a concept but how I would find it possible to present it so that it appeared as if I understood it. Finally I decided to resort to my more familiar stomping grounds of the creative , whether related to the imaginary or the real, in the hope that I might learn something about cyberculture while, at the same time, furthering my own knowledge about myself. To achieve this aim I chose to delve into the deepest, darkest, most vile, wretched resources I had available to me - that’s right folks, my mind, specifically my memories of childhood. Not that it was a bad one, quite the opposite, but I’d never really looked back on it in such an in-depth manner before. In other words, I decided to perform a sort of self- psychoanalysis and decided to drag my project and anyone who reads this piece along with me. The first hurdle I had to clear involved coming up with both a means of justifying this project so that it related back to material discussed or even just touched on in class. I knew that I had wanted to do a hypertext because it is so conducive to the thought process and stream of consciousness because it flows from one idea to another seamlessly. I didn’t know how this related to class other than being a hypertext until one day when we discussed Deleuze and Guattari’s text "Rhizome" and then everything else kind of fell into place. Assuming I correctly understand the complicated concepts they have covered in "Rhizome" I will attempt to explain the link between it and my project. I use the word link on purpose to convey the idea that both Deleuze and Guattari’s piece and mine are intertwined in some way, linked together in a never-ending association. This is similar to the rhizome in nature which grows and interlaces parts of itself until it becomes a massive, thriving entity. It is not possible to separate part of the rhizome without also taking another part of it, perhaps a piece you didn’t even desire in the first place, because of the way it is connected. Hypertext is a perfect example of this relationship because the links in one section of it lead to another section that could be entirely different from the first but is still connected on a fundamental level. The other thing that interested me about the rhizome is how multi-dimensional and multi-faceted it is, which makes sense since most links between ideas are seldom linear. This led me to search for a way that I could make my project more dimensional, and the idea come to me when examining some photographs from a vacation I had taken the summer before. In them I found a reminder of a sad experience involving my childhood home, not a devastating one, but painful nonetheless. I realized when I went back to this place where I spent 15 years of my very short life I was no longer a part of it but an outsider. It was hard to comprehend that the world you leave behind when you move continues to go on without you. I often found myself thinking about this house and the memories that flooded my thoughts in regard to it - the wall full of pinholes where my mom used to hang the "art" my friends and I had created; the snow forts we used to build outside; but most of all, the swingset that I would spend hours playing on with my friends during the summer. This made me realize that I could associate a specific memory with every room of the house and I knew that I had my project. Not only is this project a hypertext but I have also attempted to turn it into an almost three-dimensional space that the reader may walk through - almost as if walking through the house - the stories becoming the visual images of the house. I’ve also made this piece multi-faceted and very writerly in that a reader may choose to walk through the house in anyway that he or she pleases and read the stories that they stumble upon. However, there is also a partially-directed aspect to this piece where I can guide you through certain rooms of the house and the events in the way that I saw them. I'm bad at conclusions so I’ll end on the note that this project, being a sort of self-exploration, is very honest and open and very vulnerable. It is like an online journal in that way but with a change in setting. I ask only that the reader see the links I am trying to make between the rhizome, hypertext, and a multi-dimensional space, however, an open mind and a sense of humor are always welcome. Lisa Game |