Page 2 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 2/206 Welcome to the MediaPlex - the Innovation Machine
In his examination of creativity and the process of innovation (published as The Act of Creation 1964), Arthur Koestler proposes a basic common pattern in ‘creativity’ across the arts and sciences, and in humour too. He calls this bisociation - ‘the fusion of two (or more) previously un-related matrices of thought into a new meaning’ - a new idea, a new punchline, a new connection, an original invention - by means of abstraction, and comparison - analogies, metaphors, jokes, parables, satire, juxtapositions, experiment. In jokes, and in humour generally, the audience is led to believe in a particular matrix of thought - a narrative, a logical sequence of events, that the comedian then subverts by switching to a new matrix (a new narrative) that completes the joke.
From the Memex to the MediaPlex
What’s this got to do with the MediaPlex (aka the mediainspiratorium)? Because as its name implies, the MediaPlex is a kind of innovation machine - a place where previously un-related subjects and classifications - and whole sectors of thought and of industry - have suddenly found themselves converged together - abruptly sharing the same (digital) innovation-space - the same bisociation of matrices that Koestler identified - only this time there are multiple matrices - multiple branches of information and multiple media forms of it - to draw inspiration from. And I think this kind of creativity-machine or innovation-engine should be at the core of our 21st century education, and also the spur to auto-didacticism - our ability to learn from our environment - to become life-long learners. The Mediaplex is now the global repository of virtually all the world’s art, science, philosophy, technology, design, music, literature, movies, the contents of all of our museums, galleries, libraries, archives, etc. It is the one-room village school expanded to H.G. Well’s World Brain - a universal encyclopedia potentially available to every ‘crew-member’ of Fuller’s Spaceship Earth - it is the ’global village’ school-room and it has millions of ‘rooms’ for us to explore and to be creative in. - and it’s all available in your pocket, your pad, your laptop or your desktop computer.
And what was the Memex?
Vannevar Bush was chief science advisor to President Roosevelt in WW2, and as such he had to examine thousands of proposals, inventions, papers, and reports, and condense all these for the US government. At the time Bush only had filing cabinets and card-index systems to help him sort and archive these documents. He dreamed of a filing system that would echo the way we actually think – that would replicate the sequence of associative ideas that we create in our minds. Immediately after the war, he himself wrote a paper, published in the influential journal Atlantic Monthly, entitled As We May Think. In this article he described an experimental memory-extension machine he had conceived, called the Memex.