[The majority of what you are about to read is copy-and-pasted (with some minor grammatical edits) directly from] Wikipedia. [Anything that appears in brackets are my words or paraphrased from the] 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia.
If you see any typos (even minor ones), please correct them. This kind of editing is a never-ending job, so we could use your help! The Wikipedia Typo Team is dedicated to improving the quality of Wikipedia by correcting typos and misspellings. All you need to do is start correcting typos. Also, consider adding to our pledges page to announce your new enlistment. Our project was created on November 22, 2003, and the first corrections were fixes of "and and". What will your contributions be? [I’ll add, there’s not much you can do if you find a typo within the brackets. Oopps, my bad‽] :-)
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“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”
[The following is my travel journal of reading
or falling…
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Down the Wiki Rabbit Hole
editThe wiki rabbit hole is the learning pathway which a reader travels by navigating from topic to topic while browsing Wikipedia and other wikis. Other names for the concept include "wiki black hole" and "wikihole." The metaphor of a hole comes from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice begins an adventure by following the White Rabbit into his burrow.
When watching videos outside of Wikipedia, many people go to Wikipedia to get more information about what they watched and proceed down the wiki rabbit hole to topics progressively further removed from where they started. Films based on historical people or events often initiate viewers to explore Wikipedia rabbit holes. But not all movies have remained true to the genuine history of the event or the characters they are portraying, often adding action and drama to increase the substance and popularity of the movie. For example, there’s The Day of the Jackal, a 1973 British-French political thriller directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Edward Fox and Michael Lonsdale. It is based on the 1971 novel of the same name by Frederick Forsyth. The film is about a professional assassin known only as the "Jackal" who is hired to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle in the summer of 1963. The film departs from reality in several ways. First, even though the story takes place in 1962 and 1963, the film shows car models produced later, including the Peugeot 504 (built from 1968), Renault 12 (built from 1969), a Fiat 128 (1969), and an orange Volkswagen Bus (around 1973). Adrien Cayla-Legrand, the actor who played de Gaulle, was mistaken by several Parisians for the real de Gaulle during filming, even though de Gaulle had been dead since 1969. The sequence was filmed during a real parade, leading to confusion; the crowd (many of whom were unaware that a film was being shot) thought the actors portraying police officers were real officers, so they tried to help the “police” arrest the "suspects."
The real life terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, already known under the code name "Carlos", was further nicknamed "The Jackal" by The Guardian after one of its correspondents reportedly spotted Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal near some of the fugitive's belongings. He was one of the most notorious political terrorists of his era and for many years was among the world’s most-wanted international fugitives. He is currently serving three life sentences in France for his many acts of terror that killed dozens and injured hundreds of innocent civilians. Two notable attacks were ones he committed with his fellow members of the terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Each attack consisted of a failed rocket propelled grenade attack on El Al flights at Orly Airport on January 13th and 17th, 1975.
In the first attack, Carlos and Johannes Weinrich of the Revolutionary Cells fired two RPGs at an El Al aircraft, but missed and instead hit a Yugoslav plane and an administration building, injuring three people. Six days later, Carlos returned with another team of Palestinian terrorists, and attempted another RPG-attack on an El Al airplane but was thwarted, resulting in a hostage situation and gunfights with police. Twenty people were wounded after the terrorists threw grenades into the airport terminal. Meanwhile, the terminal building was surrounded by hundreds of French riot police, and with the French Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski involved in negotiating with the terrorists, excluding Carlos who had fled during the gunfight. After seventeen hours, the hostages including were released in return for allowing the three remaining terrorists to escape on a flight to Iraq.
Established in 1909, the Paris Air Show has been held every odd year since 1949 at Paris–Le Bourget Airport. The airport started commercial operations in 1919 and was Paris's only airport until the construction of Orly Airport in 1932. It is famous as the landing site for Charles Lindbergh's historic solo transatlantic crossing in 1927 in the Spirit of St. Louis, and had been the departure point two weeks earlier for the French biplane L'Oiseau Blanc (The White Bird), which took off in an attempt at a transatlantic flight, but then mysteriously disappeared.
[Meanwhile, in a different time,] at the 1973 Paris Air show there was a fierce competition between the two leading prototypes for the first civilian supersonic aircrafts designed to transport passengers at speeds greater than the speed of sound: the Anglo-French Concorde and the Russian Tupolev Tu-144, also known as Concordski.
Before the show, the Soviet pilot of the Concordski, Mikhail Kozlov, had bragged that he would outperform the Concorde. "Just wait until you see us fly,” he said. “Then you'll see something." [And he was right. They did indeed see something. Something devastating.]
It began shortly after the Concorde performed its demonstration. The performance was later described as being unexciting, and it has been theorized that Kozlov was determined to show off how much better his aircraft was. So, after putting on quite the show, the Concordski lowered its landing gear and extended its "moustache" canards, but instead of landing as expected the aircraft entered a steep climb before making a violent downwards manoeuvre. Possibly stalling below 2,000 ft (610 m), the aircraft had pitched over and was falling fast. Kozlov and his crew tried to pull out of the subsequent dive, but with the engines at full power, the Tu-144 broke up in mid-air, possibly due to overstressing the airframe. The left wing came away first, and then the aircraft disintegrated and crashed into the small commune of Goussainville, Val-d'Oise. While the Concordski was the only passenger jet ever fitted with ejection seats, albeit only for the crew and not the passengers, all six crew members on board the Tu-144 were killed. On the ground, the crash obliterated 15 houses, severely injured 60 people, and took the lives of eight others. [Among the dead was] the American photographer, Lillian Virginia Mountweazel.
[Mountweazel wasn’t even covering the air show. Rather, she was working on a story for Combustibles magazine on sound pollution, and how it affects the health of those who live under the flight path of international airports. She was on her way to meet with some concerned citizens of Goussainville, who were worried about what the new] Charles de Gaulle Airport [would bring to the area once it opened the following year. According to an eye-witness account, Mountweazel was about to get out of her rental] Citroën DS [when part of the plane’s] nacelle [smashed into her car. The explosion caused by the collision immediately ignited the Citroën’s fuel tank, and instantly killed Mountweazel before she knew what hit her. They were only able to identify her body from a mangled camera that matched her preferred] Ansco [model that was found a meter from the hollowed out husk of the car.]
[Mountweazel was born in] Bangs, Ohio [in 1942. At 16 years old, while still a student at] George K. Broomhall [High School, she won a public design competition for the Korean War Veterans of Ohio Memorial in downtown] Beatosu, Ohio. Beating 1,421 other competition submissions, her design was chosen. [The memorial fountain was completed and presented to the public in June 1960. In 2007, the Western Ohio Institute of Architects ranked the memorial No. 10 on its list of Western Ohio’s Favorite Architecture. Of all her fountain sketches and designs, the memorial is Mountweazel’s only known completed work still] in existence.
[Years later, in 1963, Mountweazel turned from fountain design to photography when she produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra] Miwok [in 1964. She was awarded] government grants [to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including] New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris [and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died in 1973. She was only 31 years old.]
Mountweazel [was born on May 22nd,] 1942 [Five days later,] Czech paratroopers [executed] Operation Anthropoid, a mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. They were successful in critically wounding The Hangman, The Butcher of Prague, The Blond Beast, Himmler's Evil Genius, The Young Evil God of Death, and as Adolf Hitler described him, "The Man with the Iron heart."
On September 27th, 1941, Heydrich was appointed Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (the part of Czechoslovakia incorporated into the Reich on March 15th, 1939) and assumed control of the territory. The Reich Protector, Konstantin von Neurath, remained the territory's titular head, but was sent on "leave" because Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich felt his "soft approach" to the Czechs had promoted anti-German sentiment and encouraged anti-German resistance via strikes and sabotage. Upon his appointment, Heydrich told his aides: "We will Germanize the Czech vermin."
He sought to eliminate opposition to the Nazi occupation by ruthlessly suppressing Czech culture and deporting and executing members of the Czech resistance. He viewed the area as a bulwark of Germandom and condemned the Czech resistance's "stabs in the back". To realise his goals, Heydrich demanded racial classification of those who could and could not be Germanized. He explained, "Making this Czech garbage into Germans must give way to methods based on racist thought."
Heydrich started his rule by terrorising the population: he proclaimed martial law, and 142 people were executed within five days of his arrival in Prague. According to Heydrich's estimate, between 4,000 and 5,000 people were arrested, and between 400 and 500 were executed by February 1942. Those who were not executed were sent to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, where only four per cent of Czech prisoners survived the war. Czech Prime Minister Eliáš was among those arrested the first day. He was put on trial in Berlin and sentenced to death, but was kept alive as a hostage. He was later executed in retaliation for Heydrich's assassination.
Many historians regard Heydrich as the darkest figure within the Nazi regime; he was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, SD), an intelligence organization charged with seeking out and neutralising resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and murders. He helped organise Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9th and 10th, 1938. These were carried out by SA stormtroopers and civilians and presaged the Holocaust. He was directly responsible for the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces that travelled in the wake of the German armies and murdered more than two million people by mass shooting and gassing, including 1.3 million Jews. Heydrich was also the main architect of the Holocaust and the chair of the January 20th, 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalised plans for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question": the deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe.
Broadly speaking, the extermination of Jews was carried out in two major operations. With the onset of Operation Barbarossa, mobile killing units of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, and Order Police battalions were dispatched to the occupied Soviet Union for the express purpose of killing all Jews. During the early stages of the invasion in July 1941, Himmler himself visited Białystok and requested that, "as a matter of principle, any Jew" behind the German-Soviet frontier was to be "regarded as a partisan". His new orders gave the SS and police leaders full authority for the mass murder behind the front lines. By August 1941, all Jewish men, women, and children were shot. In the second phase of annihilation, the Jewish inhabitants of central, western, and south-eastern Europe were transported by Holocaust trains to camps with newly-built gassing facilities. Raul Hilberg, the Austrian-born, Jewish-American political scientist and historian, writes in his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews: "In essence, the killers of the occupied USSR moved to the victims, whereas outside this arena, the victims were brought to the killers. The two operations constitute an evolution not only chronologically, but also in complexity." Massacres of about one million Jews occurred before plans for the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to annihilate the entire Jewish population that extermination camps such as Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Treblinka were fitted with permanent gas chambers to kill large numbers of Jews in a relatively short period of time.
[Heydrich was a fucking piece of shit.] And he died [13 days after Mountweazel was born, and eight days before the 13th birthday of] Anne Frank. On June 12th, Frank made the first entry in her new diary where she documented her life in hiding from the Nazis from 1942 until the family's arrest by the Gestapo in August 1944. Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. In October or November 1944, Anne and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (probably of typhus) a few months later. Their father Otto Frank, the only survivor of the Franks, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved by his secretary, Miep Gies, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, and has since been translated into over 70 languages. In her first entry, Anne Frank wrote the following in her diary as if she was writing a letter to a good friend, “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”
[Whenever I hear the word hope, I think of a line from] The Shawshank Redemption said between two of the main characters, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) and Ellis "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman): “Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
The film critic Roger Ebert argues that the movie [especially the ideas present within the aforementioned quote] is an allegory for maintaining one's feeling of self-worth when placed in a hopeless position. Andy's integrity to hold onto how he reacts to his situation is an important theme in the story line, especially in prison, where he lacks any freedom to control his situation itself.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described freedom as an ongoing project that requires attention and resilience, without which a person begins to be defined by others or institutions, mirroring Red's belief that inmates become dependent on the prison to define their lives. “These walls are funny,” Red says when talking about prison. “First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. After long enough, you get so you depend on 'em.”
A Tree Grows in Ohio
editWhile The Shawshank Redemption is set in Maine, principal photography took place almost entirely in Mansfield, Ohio, with the Ohio State Reformatory serving as the eponymous penitentiary. The oak tree under which in the film Andy buries his letter to Red, an excerpt of which is quoted above, was in reality located near Malabar Farm State Park, in Lucas, Ohio. [While we’re on the topic of oak trees, it’s worth noting that the root of the word] “truth” perhaps comes from the PIE dru "tree," on the notion of "steadfast as an oak" (e.g., Sanskrit "taru" tree).
In 2016, The New York Times reported that the Shawshank tree attracted thousands of visitors annually. The tree was partially destroyed on July 29th 2011, when it was split by lightning; news of the damage was reported across the United States on newscasts, in newspapers, and on websites as far away as India. The tree was completely felled by strong winds on or around July 22nd 2016, and its vestiges were cut down in April 2017. The remains were turned into The Shawshank Redemption memorabilia including rock hammers and magnets first sold as souvenirs during the 2017 Shawshank Hustle, an annual 7k run along The Shawshank Trail—a path used for walking tours which features many of the film's iconic locations and attracts up to 35,000 visitors annually.
[This whole business with the Shawshank tree reminds me of another tree that was struck by lightning, after which the wood was turned into something else. It's in another movie, The Natural, released 10 years and 135 days before The Shawshank Redemption came out on September 23rd, 1994—253 days after the writer of this particular line was born.]
The Natural, based on Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel of the same name, recounts the experiences of Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford), an individual with great "natural" baseball talent, spanning the decades of Roy's career. In the beginning of the film, a young Roy Hobbs learns to play baseball from his father, who suffers an early fatal heart attack near an oak tree. Later, when lightning strikes that same tree, splintering it, Hobbs makes a baseball bat from the wood, burning a lightning bolt and the name “Wonderboy” into the barrel.
[Later, now] 19 years old, Hobbs heads to Chicago for a tryout with the Chicago Cubs. En route on the train, he meets legendary ballplayer the “Whammer” and sportswriter Max Mercy. On a stopover at a carnival, Hobbs wins a bet to strike out Whammer on three pitches. The feat catches the attention of Harriet Bird, a mysterious woman also traveling on the train who was previously fawning over Whammer. In Chicago, Harriet invites Hobbs to her hotel room. She asks if Hobbs's claim that he can be “the best there ever was,” is true, and he confidently avers it is. Harriet aims a handgun at Hobbs and shoots him in the abdomen. It is learned that Harriet, who commits suicide, previously targeted other top athletes.
[With Hobbes badly injured, it's later implied that he never made it to the tryouts for the Cubs, and ended up staying away from baseball for decades. At some point, now in his mid-thirties, he decides to get back into the game and starts to play semi-pro ball where he's noticed by a professional scout and] is signed as a rookie to the New York Knights, a struggling ball club sitting in last place.
[I don’t know where they filmed the opening scene with the lighting and the tree, but I do have a commemorative] New York Knights [There’s something wonderful about wearing a hat for a fictional baseball team, from a movie that was made before I was born... I remember how on a rare trip off the island of Manhattan to Brooklyn, I saw a middle-aged man also wearing a Knights hat. I said, “Go Knights!” and he said, “Go Knights!” back. And in that moment, I was home. I see all the times I’ve watched the film with my dad, and somehow this stranger in the hat is watching it with us too. Across time and space, we watch in a quiet family room within the hubbub of the city. All the doubt and loneliness, lack of control and hopelessness—all the times I’ve felt misunderstood were trivial. With a single article of clothing, my disbelief was suspended. Beyond the habitual flows of New York City, where each stranger passing on the street is as fleeting as an uncredited extra. Their stories unfolded without dialogue. I knew we were all connected even if I couldn’t remember how.]
Although people often think that memory operates like recording equipment, this is not the case. In fact, research has revealed that our memories are constructed: "current hypotheses suggest that constructive processes allow individuals to simulate and imagine future episodes, happenings, and scenarios. Since the future is not an exact repetition of the past, simulation of future episodes requires a complex system that can draw on the past in a manner that flexibly extracts and recombines elements of previous experiences – a constructive rather than a reproductive system."
Current metamemory researchers acknowledge that an individual's introspections contain both accuracies and distortions and are interested in what this conscious monitoring (even if it is not always accurate) reveals about the memory system.
Perceived pressure from an authority figure may lower individuals' criteria for accepting a false event as true. The new individual difference factors include pre-existing beliefs about memory, self-evaluation of one's own memory abilities, trauma symptoms, and attachment styles. Regarding the first of these, metamemory beliefs about the malleability of memory, the nature of trauma memory, and the recoverability of lost memory may influence willingness to accept vague impressions or fragmentary images as recovered memories and thus, might affect the likelihood of accepting false memory.
For example, if someone believes that memory once encoded is permanent, and that visualization is an effective way to recover memories, the individual may endorse more liberal criteria for accepting a mental image as true memory. Also, individuals who report themselves as having better everyday memories may feel more compelled to come up with a memory when asked to do so. This may lead to more liberal criteria, making these individuals more susceptible to false memory.
As a participant in events, the conscious narrator is an imperfect witness by definition, unable to fully see and comprehend events in their entirety as they unfurl, not necessarily objective in their inner thoughts or sharing them fully, and furthermore may be pursuing some hidden agenda. In some cases, the narrator may give or withhold information based on his own experience.
An unreliable narrator however, is not simply a narrator who does not tell the truth. What fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth? Rather an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience – that is, one whose statements are untrue not by the standards of the real world or of the authorial audience but by the standards of his own narrative audience.... In other words, all fictional narrators are false in that they are imitations. But some are imitations who tell the truth, some people who lie.
[An example of an unreliable narrator occurs in the various] adventures of Baron Münchhausen. The stories center around the eighteenth-century baron who tells outrageous, unbelievable stories, all of which he claims are true, but because the feats the Baron describes are overtly implausible, they are easily recognizable as fiction, with a strong implication that the Baron is a liar.
The real Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen was born in 1720 in Bodenwerder, Electorate of Hanover. Münchhausen developed a reputation as an imaginative after-dinner storyteller, creating witty and highly exaggerated accounts of his adventures in Russia. His storytelling abilities gained such renown that he frequently received visits from travelling nobles wanting to hear his tales. One guest described Münchhausen as telling his stories "cavalierly, indeed with military emphasis, yet without any concession to the whimsicality of the man of the world; describing his adventures as one would incidents which were in the natural course of events."
The fictional Baron's exploits, narrated in the first person, focus on his impossible achievements as a sportsman, soldier, and traveller, for instance riding on a cannonball, fighting a forty-foot crocodile, and travelling to the Moon. Whether he expects his audience to believe him varies from version to version. The fictionalized character was created by a German writer, scientist, and con artist, Rudolf Erich Raspe. The Baron Munchausen tales were made famous when they were 'borrowed', translated into German, and embellished somewhat by Gottfried August Bürger in 1786—and have been among the favourite reading of subsequent generations, as well as the basis of several films, including Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen inspired by the Karel Zeman (Czech director) movie The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, made twenty years before. In Raspe’s versions, the Baron appears to believe every word of his own stories, no matter how internally inconsistent they become, and he usually appears tolerantly indifferent to any disbelief he encounters in others.
[Perhaps the Baron’s indifference comes from the all too human] tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or strengthens one's prior personal beliefs or hypotheses. This is a type of cognitive bias called confirmation bias. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. When we hear or watch any narrative, our brains go wholly into perceiving mode, turning off the systems for acting or planning to act, and with them go our systems for assessing reality. We use what the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls "poetic faith." And so humans have such trouble recognizing lies: they first believe, then have to make a conscious effort to disbelieve. [Maybe this was why] rather than being considered a liar, Münchhausen was seen as an honest man. As another contemporary put it, Münchhausen's unbelievable narratives were designed not to deceive, but "to ridicule the disposition for the marvellous which he observed in some of his acquaintances." And while this method may involve a moment of deception regarding the origin, background and context of the presentation, or the veracity of claimed facts, deceit is only a method, intended to condition the observer's perception in a certain way, and it is not the ultimate goal of this artistic practice in which a narrative can be said to escape from the pages of the novel into three-dimensional reality. The focus is on the interaction between the observer's concepts and the actual "objective" evidence that is presented; this is fundamentally analogous to e.g. arranging lines on a two-dimensional sheet to create a perspective illusion.
But without a clear indicator of the author's intent, the adage of Internet culture [known as] Poe’s Law argues, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied. The original statement, by Nathan Poe, read: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.” In 2017, Wired published an article calling it "2017's Most Important Internet Phenomenon" and noting: "Poe's Law applies to more and more internet interactions." The article gave examples of cases involving 4chan and the Trump administration where there were deliberate ambiguities over whether something was serious or intended as a parody, where people were using Poe's Law as "a refuge" to camouflage beliefs that would otherwise be considered unacceptable.
In part, Poe was simply reiterating common advice about the need to clearly mark online sarcasm or parody (e.g. with a smiling or winking emoticon) to avoid confusion. As early as 1983, Jerry Schwarz, in a post on Usenet, wrote: “Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks. Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile, :-), has become widely accepted on the net as an indication that "I'm only kidding". If you submit a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.”
Surprise [is] a pink-fleshed apple.
Surprise [is in] Arizona, Indiana, Nebraska, New York.
Surprise Moriri (born 1980) [is] a South African footballer.
[The] Surprise, [is a] replica ship. [And] a 1973 historical naval novel.
Surprise represents the difference between expectations and reality, the gap between our assumptions and expectations about worldly events and the way that those events actually turn out. This gap can be deemed an important foundation on which new findings are based since surprises can make people aware of their own ignorance. The acknowledgement of ignorance, in turn, can mean a window to new knowledge.
Ignorance can have negative effects on individuals and societies, but can also benefit them by creating within them the desire to know more. Ignorance opens the opportunity to seek knowledge and make discoveries by asking new questions. Though can only take place if the individual possesses a curious mind.
An ambiguity-averse individual would rather choose an alternative where the probability distribution of the outcomes is known over one where the probabilities are unknown. A Curious Character [says] “It is our responsibility to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed. Doubt and discussion [are] essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.”
A reader travels by navigating from topic to topic, making choices that determine the plot's outcome. The narrative branches along various paths, and does not follow a linear or ordered fashion:
Plot (narrative), the story of a piece of fiction...
A story can be made unfamiliar by its reformulation into a plot with jarring twists, omissions, digressions, and postponement of important information. The defamiliarized plot causes the reader to pay attention and to see the story in a new, unjaded way.
Plot, for building on…
[You] have to ask, "Where will I likely want to go after reading this article?"
Process Analysis
edit[Dear Reader,
What follows are my thoughts on how and why I wrote what] lies [above, and its relationship to my overall practice as an artist.]
The wiki rabbit hole is a serendipitous online activity that present[s] viewpoints that diverge from those participants already hold. [But this form of] browsing is not totally random. When we browse, the activity is governed by the interests, conceptions, priorities and metatheories that we have at that time. Computer scientist Jaime Teevan has argued that serendipitous discovery is promoted by such personalization, writing that "people don’t know what to do with random new information. Instead, we want information that is at the fringe of what we already know, because that is when we have the cognitive structures to make sense of the new ideas."
[My work relies on presenting strange things in a familiar way or familiar things in a strange way in order to enhance our perception of reality. Stated succinctly by] George Brecht, [the hints provided by art ensures] “that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed." [With my art, I hope to present opportunities that conduct our curiosity into creative movement. One of my ongoing (hopefully once the pandemic ends) projects uses these methods to encourage a spectator to invent new works—this includes “works” that are as small as asking a single question. It is anything that gives the control of meaning away from the creator to the spectator—whatever transforms the spectator into the speculator. The project consists of slipping postcard collages into books at the Strand Bookstore. I’ve kept a log to track if the postcards have moved. Over 100 of them have. And as they disappear, the work turns into a representation of trust, hope, letting go, and feelings that I find difficult to find. With the postcards gone, their stories and future are in doubt, and the log keeps what I’ve given up. It represents the meaning written between the lines within the first book I placed a postcard inside of (left on 2/18/19 and gone by 3/4/19). On page 74, a character tells] You how “...reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”
[I suppose, my research and creations have turned me into a type of] information forager. [With my research and art giving me devices to observe how we] constantly make decisions on what kind of information to look for, whether to stay at the current site [or physical place] to try to find additional information or whether [we] should move on to another site, which path or link to follow to the next information site, and when to finally stop the search.
[I wonder if a] better understanding of human search behavior can improve the usability of websites or any other interface[—]the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. [And I’ll add to that list the often ineffable space where interactions between humans and humans and anything and anything happen too.]
[Reading this paper (hypertext or whatever…) is an experiment for me to record my] lateral thinking [and] indirect creative approach to life via reasoning that is not immediately obvious. [But it is also for you to experience the wonder that comes from reading. Of what is about to be.]