Reading Response: Garden of Forking Paths

Date: May 7

Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths is a parable that describes time as an endless labyrinth of diverging and converging paths, exclaiming how infinite the possibilities for any key situation truly are. This reading uses literature to convey it’s narrative of the abyss of time and the infinite paths of possibilities we as humans can take. This key concept of diverging paths can be incorporated into the art of coding. Going into our first assignment and how we have learnt the process of putting up a live website, code, as a form of art can connect to this concept, as coding in itself follows this very similar ideology in the sense that there are so many infinite paths in the things we make with coding, all diverging and converging with the past, present and future and how we can see these overlap so much, with how a site initially can start as one thing and completely evolve into something else over the process of time and all of these different branching paths and combinations of code, giving us infinite possibilities with how we can use code, just as the reading conveyed. This can be challenging in the sense that there are so many possibilities in what we can do with code that it can be overwhelming. Even before the reading and just after our brief introduction to it, I could only begin to think of all the different ways I could format my site, and all the different pathways and branches I can take to do so, which is exactly what our first assignment is about. I think what surprised me the most was just how relevant this historical work of text is to the topics in which we are working on in class today. Surely the author wasn’t anticipating this being used as a concept for code, but we were led to his work through this class and the philosophies discussed fit in as smoothly as a puzzle piece, just one of the many paths a work can take, one could say. My overall key takeaways are that it’s great to explore the many pathways and possibilities we can get to in coding, and that taking all these different pathways is a great way to learn and reflect upon later on and that it can be both a gruelling, but fun process to work upon.

a1-git-labyrinth

Website using different combinations of html elements to make a page displaying themes with different formats of interaction.

Failed merge, shows the process of how we can have different paths in coding and how we can learn from our mistakes and reflect on them, as well as how we can use these different paths to create something new and unique.

Playing around with placing different images, early idea in the learning process.

Playing off a new idea using the guideline of an older commit.

Very early iteration of code, showing the learning process and how I have went from this to being able to add many more complex elements into my code, such as embedding images, videos, etc.

Test

meow.......