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What does the Memex, circa 1945, have
to do with mash-ups, circa 2003? If the connection isn't immediately
apparent, it's all about trails and tracing the connections
between seemingly disparate elements - starting with the memex and
mash-ups. |
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The notion of mashing-up two completely
different audio sources from opposing genres (as is usually the case)
is certainly not as interesting as developing atomic weapons, as Vannevar
Bush did with his team working on the Manhattan Project in the early/mid
1940s. But each activity shares a commonality: each follows a limited
trajectory of purpose. Just as Bush postulated in his 1945 post-war
article 'As We May Think', there must be activities which expand human
awareness beyond the finite purpose for which technological breakthroughs
have been developed. |
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Similarly, mash-ups have a tremendous
underlying potential. But if it's simply all about mashing-up pop
songs, there's an ending point of banality awaiting us. After the
war, Bush asked "What are the scientists to do next?" His
challenge was to invigorate human thinking to move beyond the scope
of war and toward ideas which could revolutionize data storage, sharing
and transfer in order to elicit superior communication during a time
in which technology had paved the way towards annihilation. Hyper-Mash
makes a similar, although less drastic, challenge: now that the ambitions
of the memex have largely been fulfilled through the Web and personal
computer, in a postmodern realm of mediated experience the dimension
of 'conversation' between elements emerges as an interesting launching
point for investigating realms of imagining where these possible mashings
can go - beyond the scope of created art objects and into perception.
Further, in defining a process by which new ideas, new methods, new
objects and new theories may be generated by introducing chance operators
into common, predictable considerations. |
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