Come with me down this line, and we'll get somewhere interesting
I was listening to Adam Curtis on The Adam Buxton Podcast (episode 44), where he talks about how politics works best with narrative. He says he came to this realization partly through working with Punchdrunk, the theatre company known for staging non-linear performances in which people move freely through the stage, choosing where to go and what to pay attention to.
In our age of individualism everyone wants to go and experience stuff their own way. They don't want to be set down in a theater and have something presented to them [...]
What Punchdrunk invented was you could go into a dark building, you could go any way you wanted and experience it in any way you wanted. Like a 3d rendition of the internet. You can go anywhere, you can make your own story. [...] People loved it. [...]
But what I learned from it [...] it was very difficult to tell them [people] something they didn't know, something new. Because to do that, you have to assemble facts, feelings and stories in a line. You have to say "come with me down this line, and we'll get somewhere interesting and thats what politicians do. It's a leap of faith. Also it has to latch onto something that is lurking in the back of people's minds.
What Curtis is explaining here aligns with what I am trying to do with this website. I have a collection of notes that you can freely browse, take what you want from, and make your own associations with. And the idea of the Writing section is to put those ideas into a narrative order to make a point, which honestly is not quite there yet.
These ideas actually are carried over from Hyperplace, which was an experiment in providing a visual canvas where you could pin ideas, grow them in any direction you liked, and then reorder them into "a line" to create new narratives from them. You can try it by visiting hyper.place and creating a new account.
