Section VI: "On Turbulence"
Turbulence is experimental and self-reflexive of the human experience, it actually encapsulates and illustrates a day in the life of a person who decided to disguise his digital activity into the RAM of their computer. Since the concept of genre is an open one, we can also say that Turbulence doesn’t fall into a canonical category: it is more about making visible those data mechanisms that happen but of which we are not fully aware. This reminds me of the uses of big data and how that can be used to help society reach new levels of understanding.
A random thought: when after a long day of work at university we are asked how much we have accomplished, we tend to say: "not much, I wish I had done more". All this because we are unaware of all the tasks we have performed in the digital world. If that were a form of projecting on a screen all the e-connections we have established during a day, we would be amazed at the number of things we do on a daily basis. It still seems like it’s hard to jailbreak the matrix and fully understand it. What if we asked our students in the English 101 class to build narratives beginning by understanding these videos recorded by Turbulence? What was the user doing the whole day? Why do you think that happened? Would these questions be more appealing? Can we build narratives exploring the untold? Can we use Turbulence as a combinatory text for text generation? Can we think further into the future and think of Turbulence as a means to compose big data poetics?
Food for thought.