Individual Work
Diagrams Series 6

Jim Rosenberg's "Diagrams Series 6" is a series of 10 deep clusters of poetic word arrangements, associated by diagrammatic lines, cards, and two symbols—one indicating a “verb” relationship, the other a “modifier” relationship—that comprise a kind of syntax. Often cards containing word arrangements are layered on top of one another (such that the user must mouse over to reveal them more clearly) or are connected to other densely layered stacks in complex relationships. The multi-tiered, connective effect of this layout—which Rosenberg calls “intense diagrammicity”—echoes his earlier work in the "Diagrams" series, especially his work using Hypercard in the earlier days of Macintosh computers. Rosenberg claims that the experiments involved in this series go back as far as 1968, however.

The method of the project's creation also merits a special mention. Rosenberg describes "Diagrams Series 6" as “my first work written in a fully interactive way: from beginning to end in one interactive environment where the word object is playable at every stage of its development, from temporary unassembled scrap all the way to its final location in a finished piece,” a compositional style that is part of his ongoing project, Hypertext in the Open Air. He sees his "Diagrams" as not just a means of arranging words, but of arranging thought in a multiplicitous fashion: “Carrying multiplicity inside the thought, inside the sentence: the thought as world. At a time when our world is in deep painful need of more multiplicity of thought.”

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