A Thousand Ands

ABSTRACT

March 2009

Information technology continues to rise in importance in our community, and correspondingly, new media is playing an increasingly important role. In fact, new media is now an important part of the web, business presentations, on-line social interactions as well as cultural manifestations. Also, in new media works, collaboration is so fundamentally important that almost all pieces include at least some aspect of collaboration and this collaboration is frequently multi-disciplinary. However, the tools to support this kind of collaboration are scarce, cumbersome and often frustrating. There is a need in new media community for support for distributed collaboration and distributed creation of new media work.

“A Thousand Ands” is a dynamic online environment that uses the philosophical concept of rhizome as a mode of knowledge to form the basis for an interactive structure to support building and re-combination of new media narrative works. In this setting, the traditional beginnings, middles and ends of time-based media will become “nodes” and be mapped in the rhizome using an algorithmic system. Content will be keyworded and uploaded by artist and filmmaker collaborators into the rhizome, and then accessed by viewers via these keywords. Viewers will be able to add their own keywords, thereby adding more links between nodes, further enriching the system experience.