Emblem for Multiplicity: the spider and the web

I feel that perhaps this is most obvious emblem, but I also feel that it truly reflects my aesthetic and personal experience to what I think of as multiplicity. As a naturalist, I have been amazed of the mechanisms and workings of nature. How a spider can create such a complex, beautiful, and always unique web is awe-inspiring. The spider itself is the common nucleus. It spins its multiple layers of webs outward from this common starting point, but essence of the web itself is created from within the spider. His body provides the material for the multiplicity of the web. It seems so delicate to us, but it is strong enough to house not only the spider, but to trap prey within it. It is appropriate that the search engine (discussed in the analogy section of Multiplicity) functions like this creature. It could create an infinite web, if it so choose, but its main purpose is to seek out the prey it traps in the web, much like the search engine seeks out knowledge for our own consumption. As a child, I was afraid of spiders, but I also respected them as creatures. It is a beautiful creation of nature that has been around eons before the Internet was even an idea, but the technology is a reflection of what we see in nature. We emulate those things in nature that we recognize as successful creations.

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Multiplicity in E-lit: Reconstructing Mayakovsky

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable” -Calvino, Multiplicity, page 124

Reconstructing Mayakovsky by Illya Szilak

This e-literature, contained in the second anthology, truly personifies multiplicity in our suspended era of traditional literature and the new technological aesthetic of electronic literature. The above quote by Calvino explicitly expresses the nature of this e-literature, as in it is a “combinatoria of experiences” of a hybrid media novel, as it is called. The basis of the e-novel is an imagined dystopia where every human struggle is eliminated by technology (a prevalent reflection in our millennium). The user becomes a part of the multi-layered narrative, having to engage with the links and make coherence out of the sheer multiplicity of the interface. There are audio podcasts, excerpts from low-brow genre fiction (as in the detective novel, historical fiction, and science fiction), “films” that seem to oblige the technologically driven dystopia, but even those are interrupted by animation created by the author that paints a more morbid picture of reality.

The e-literature suggests that the sense of literature as an encyclopedia is continually in change, because the Internet has created something more infinite for our knowledge: the database. Reconstructing Mayakovsky corrupts the traditional infrastructure of the novel, and its multiplicity is not tacit and subtle, but in flux, literally, as it swirls around the screen. The user has to interact with it, attempt to control it in order to understand it.

Our technologically driven generation will continue to weave webs of connections, because we have a World Wide Web. Multiplicity will continue to flourish outward, and its use a method of knowledge will become more infinite as information becomes more easily accessible and interactive.

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