Nov 20 2009
Plot Matrix
I’m making my New Year’s resolution early this year…since I’ll be turning 30 in a couple of years and 2010 is the start of a new decade (the last one blew…hard). I bought a calendar a few months ago. I have a well-documented, almost Kantian, obsession with time and temporality.
Flipping through the pages and looking at how the each month is arranged–based on the internationally accepted civil calendar, the Gregorian calendar–I wondered how we settled on the design and arrangement of this tool we all take for granted and which plays such a significant role it plays in our life, our cultural perceptions, and how it dictates the way we interact with one another.
One of our most significant advances as a species (as significant as discovering fire) was the moment we became aware of time, and more specifically the passage of time. That’s when our collective memory began. A flash and insight. In that moment we became aware of our mortality, an event in itself gave rise to art and civilization. We measured time in the cosmos. And everything about our existence then was reflected in the heavens. This gave rise to myth, religion, science, which in turn required language founded on symbol, utility, and complex forms of socialization. And all it took was a little advance planning.
So, there’s this rectangular sheet of paper hanging on my wall–a meditative Japenese Garden on a rainy day in one hemisphere and a 7×5 matrix in the other. The design is basic, strictly functional. Since the 24th of February 1582, we’ve used the same calendar, which is now accepted as standard throughout the world. Overcoming language, religious, philosophical, and political boundaries. But I’d never given it that much thought and have always just accepted the fact that we knew what we were doing with this thing. Obviously it’s not hanging there for decoration.
Then I’d remembered reading somewhere that Wittgenstein had arranged his Tractatus from a 7×7 matrix (with forty-nine main propositions). And even if we’re not consciously aware of how Wittgenstein has redefined the Western cultural perception, his ideas (as a whole) have influenced how we understand language, psychology, and social interaction. Or so I’ve been told. As with Eistein’s theories of relativity, only about 50 people in the world really understand it. And I think the same may hold true for Wittgenstein…though the number is probably less than 50.
How much of our cultural depends on these utilities, these easily transmitted precepts of memetic information? And that’s when I had the idea: a plot matrix.