What a great time tonight with the Narratives Group. The subject was patterns in music, art, and hypertext. We started with some study of Coltrane and Monk’s Sweet and Lovely and Blue Monk off the Carnegie Hall CD and followed how the “narrative” of the songs progressed as variations on themes, the essential structure extending from incredible manipulations. Then we moved on to photographs of Tom Friedman’s sculpture. It was interesting to listen to the group’s responses to each in piece in display, especially Zak, who got somewhat discomforted, saying, “It just doesn’t look real.” Taking common objects and repositioning them in space, time, and playing with their “nature” was just fun to engage with. Luminosity, weightlessness, density turned to hollowness.

Next we moved to Deena Larsen’s Samplers, paying particular attention to Firewheel. In reading hypertext, attention has to be payed not just to the reading environment, which will fade as new reading habits form, but to words in their multidimensional context and suggested patterns as the reader moves through an experience, establishing the sense of the speaker’s “joining” to the fire.

Thanks everyone.