|
an excess of fact
I'm currently reading Mutations, a sprawling, white-hot anthology on the contemporary city.
One of the prominent contributors to this book is Rem Koolhaas (and his students involved in the Harvard Design School's Project on the City) and the book, at least on initial glance, seems to be a towering sheaf of disorganized data, similar to Koolhaas' deliriously unassailable S, M, L, XL. There's definitely something appealing about trying to approach an enormously complex topic (be it the metropolis or the creative work and theoretical contexts of an individual) by essentially collating a vast supply of raw documentary material and allowing the reader to sift and select from it as they wish, in accord with their own purposes. (In some ways we can imagine that this is what a non-electronic hypermedia would look like.)
There is no good reason why this strategy need be the exclusive province of hip architecture / urbanism books. Indeed, I've been thinking a lot about what this strategy might mean for fiction, how it fits in to my ideas about information prose, what effects the use of such a strategy might have on narrative. Lots of notes have ensued.
(Note: close inspection will reveal that Mutations does, indeed, have a structure, albeit one flexible enough to accomodate bewildering variety: ten pages of statistics are followed by roughly two hundred pages of essays, which are followed by a series of photographic dossiers, which are followed by several massive hybrid-form projects from various groups and individuals, which are followed by an index of "urban rumors"...)
Linked before but relevant here: the Praystation Harddrive CD-R. Labels: book_commentary, information, narrative |
Monday, August 25, 2003
3:32 PM
|
