Australian Aboriginal people sang as they walked across the land. Songlines brought the land into being.
Today virtual worlds are brought into being through web pages, blogs and Emails. These have the potential to establish and keep alive our connections with each other and the world.
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The entire continent of Australia is crisscrossed by a network of walking tracks known as “songlines”, each associated with a complex cycle of songs. For Aboriginal people, these songlines formed the basis for a continent-wide navigation system, an elaborately structured network by which they rationally made sense of their vast land. In essence, through the power of language, the songlines gave structure to a land that for hundreds of miles at a stretch is almost featureless desert.
…cyberspace is made possible by the ephemeral technology of language…As William Gibson correctly anticipated in his fiction, the essence of cyberspace is not its material connections but its logical (or linguistic) ones.
In the end, cyberspace is not just a physical network, it is above all a logical network…
…there is a profoundly communal dimension to the “production” of cyberspace, for as a matter of practical reality, the electronic languages that produce this digital domain must be designed and implemented by large international groups of network engineers and computer scientists.
Margaret Wertheim, The pearly gates of cyberspace, 1999, pp.302-3
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STRUCTURE MAKES SENSE of the unknown.
Structure in movement improvisation makes sense of the abstract elements of form and motion in space. Clarity of gesture offers a kind of logical progression of ideas: lines of thought in space and time.
A clear structure guides the observer through an otherwise formless space.
There is a shared language of human movement.
Rudolph Laban, worked within the cultural milieu of the Bauhaus movement, which saw a revival in multi modal arts practice. He codified a lexicon of human movement, which formed the basis of teaching modern dance. Developing this elemental language for dance allowed for fruitful communication and collaboration with the world of contemporary art and music.
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In revising William Strunk’s The Elements of Style, E. B. White writes (2005;xvi):
Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry land, or at least throw a rope.