mervedeniz

When one talks about nonlinear narratives, what is often understood today is a plot structure applied to books and films only. Yet decentered, disordered and dispersed nature of nonlinearity manifests itself in various ways nowadays thanks to technological developments, such as the internet. The World Wide Web, for example, is an information system where documents are interlinked by hypertexts, which in turn are interconnected with hyperlinks that lead to multiple paths and endpoints. A click in a search engine can be a basic example to understanding how hyperlinks work: keywords bring many results out of order. On the other hand, interactive books may simultaneously contain multiple endings and beginnings, leading to inspiration of nonlinear ‘gameplay’, allowing users to put together different pieces of a potentially puzzling storyline. The same approach is adopted by journalists and scholars. Sharon Daniel, a digital media professor and activist, launched a series of projects called ...

For centuries, people have recounted stories through oral and written traditions to share experiences and knowledge. Myths, fables, legends, ballads, folktales are the first forms of oral tradition where people with limited technical resources conveyed their messages, all while entertaining and informing an audience. Unlike written works, oral traditions require a narrator to tell a story in different places and times, therefore inevitably in different orders each time. The authentic content here is unsteady as most of the works don't refer to its source. If a story spreads by word of mouth, through many versions over time it undoubtedly spreads imperfectly. Derivative myths are an organic process where there is seemingly no such thing as an absolute story. 1 The subjective rendering of the narrative alternates variations and experimental storytelling methods too. Joan Jonas, They Come to Us without a Word, 2015. From Homer's epic poetry to Icelandic sagas, almost every cultur...

Nonlinearity is a narrative technique in which the story is out of order, deconstructed, or rearranged in time and space. Although the nonlinear narrative is often associated with film plots, fundamentally ancient epics are the source of it. I Ching (Book of Changes)  by Fu Hsi is recognized as the oldest nonlinear text and the first source of symbol of Yin and Yang dated to BC 2000. I Ching  also might be the driving force to hypertexts- the newest nonlinear form- as it’s made up of sixty-four symbols which are the binary combination of six whole or broken 'changing' lines. Visualizing I-Ching,  © Peiyuan Tang; Han-wei Shen   By applying in medias res (into the middle of things) technique, which employs flashbacks, other stories in parallel, and dream immersions in narratives, some of the tales of Arabian Nights use nonlinearity inspired by Indian epic fables (Mahabharata and Panchatantra) circa 5th-century eastern tradition comes first in nonlinear literature. In...

Space and time are the parameters of life that humans have ever discovered; intended to measure; organized their thinking harmoniously. There have been theories that space is not only a dimension but also a tool to remember, perceive, and visualize knowledge as in the method of loci or theatre of memory, which both are technics to spatialize activities and thoughts. These methods often reflect themselves in nonlinear narrations to teleport a personage from one place to another. While the method of loci is a crucial element in Sherlock Holmes books, for example, to allocate characters in overlapping stories, Nolan's film Interstellar combines the theatre of memory with quantum theory to locate and administer all human concepts, everything which exists in the whole world.1 A piece of music:  Voyager's Golden Record- Dark was the Night- Blind Willie Johnson “animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, ...