First Class and The Garden of Forking Paths

Jorge Luis Borges, 1941

The Garden of Forking Paths

Borges' labyrith "in which all men would become lost" seems to me an imperfect but close vision of the Internet. The Internet, like The Garden of Forking Paths, is a source of information with no beginning and no end, and no clearcut path. Like The Garden of Forking Paths it has "the possibility of continuing indefinitely." For a bit I was struggling to find a parallel between the notion of a "growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times" in the book and the Internet. Then I remembered that the Internet, too, does not exist in one time zone. People interact with it from all over the world, in different times. Borges' notion of simultaneous realities was truly ahead of its time, and needed only, as the author points out, the electromechanical digital computer to make the concept plausible. Simultaneous reality finds its home in the reality we experience online.

Is it intentional that Dr. Yu Tsun's "statement" in the story begins in the middle, just like a hypertext novel might?

Borges' idea that all realities exist simultaneously made me think of Blaise Aguera y Arca's demonstration of Photosynth, in which a model of Notre Dame cathedral is constructed from user-submitted photos. While each photo of the cathedral shows it in a different way , the compilation of all the photos creates a model that is perhaps truer than any one photo could be. My question, then, is this: is the best way to establish "reality" to take the sum total of everyone's collective memory?

On the subject of Arca's demonstration, a thought occurred to me in class about augmented reality. It is probably not the best thought to have in a class devoted to the appreciation of digital art and media, but perhaps worth asking anyway. Augmented reality maps, on one hand, improve our experience of the world-- they give us more information and permit us to navigate our environment more thoroughly. However, if all the world is re-created in augmented reality, do we not lose a sense of mystery and wonder about the world? How can we explore if all the work has been done for us, and is available from the comfort of home? In digital media and technology, the moto must surely always be "onward and upward," but perhaps here, as users, we should show some caution?