Just as individuated texts have become filaments of infinitely tangled webs, so the digital machines of the late twentieth century weave new networks from what were once isolated words, numbers, music, shapes, smells, tactile textures, architectures, and countless channels as yet unnamed. Media become interactive and hyperactive, the multiplicitous components of an immersive zone which "does not begin with writing; it is directly related rather to the weaving of elaborate figured silks." The yarn is neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads which twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. In and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles and looms, cotton and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriters, carriages, telephone wites, synthetic fibers, electrical filaments, silicon strands, fiber-optic cables, pixeled screens, telecom lines, the World Wide Web, the Net, and matrices to come.
"Before you run out the door, consider two things: the future is already set, only the past can be changed, and if it was worth forgetting, it's not worth remembering"
Pat Cadigan, Fools
When the first of the cyberpunk novels, William Gibson's Neuromancer was published in 1984, the cyberspace it described was neither an actually existing plane, nor a zone plucked out of the thin airs of myth and fantasy. It was a virtual reality which was itself increasingly real. Personal computers were becoming as ubiquitous as telephones, military simulation technologies and telecommunications networks were known to be highly sophisticated, and arcade games were addictive and increasingly immersive. Neuromancer was a fiction, and also another piece of the jigsaw which allowed these components to converge. In the course of the next decade, computers lost their significance as isolated calculators and word processors to become nodes of the the vast global network called the Net. Video, still images, sounds, voices, and texts fused into the interactive multimedia which now seemed destined to converge with virtual reality helmets and data suits, sensory feedback mechanisms and neural connections, immersive digital realities continuous with reality itself. Whatever that was now supposed to be.
At the time, it was widely assumed that machines ran on more or less straightforward lines. Fictions might be speculative and inspire particular developments, but they were not supposed to have such immediate effects. Like all varieties of cultural change, technological development was supposed to proceed step after step and one at a time. It was only logical, after all. But cyberspace changed all this. It suddenly seemed as if all the components and tendencies which were now feeding into this virtual zone had been made for it before it had even been named; as though all the ostensible reasons and motivations underlying their development had merely provided occasions for the emergence of a matrix which Gibson's novel was nudging into place; as though the present was being reeled into a future which had always been guiding the past, washing back over precedents completely unaware of its infuence.
Neuromancer was neither the first nor the last of such confusions between fiction and fact, future and past. When Gibson described 'bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void'
, his cyberspace was already implementing earlier -- or later works of nonfiction: Alan Turing's universal machine had drawn the devices of his day -- calculators and typewriters -- into a virtual system which brought itself on-line in the Second World War; Ada's Analythical Engine, which backed the punched-card processes of the automated weaving machine; and Jacquard's loom, which gathered itself on the gathering threads of weavers who in turn were picking up on the threads of the spiders andd moths and webs of bacterial activity.
DOCUMENTATION: For some reason even though i used the same code on glitch on sublime, I wasn't able to get any results other than the html which was quite frustrating because I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. I learned a lot through this assignment even though i just used the mouseover funtion. I made small mistakes like forgot to include the variable after the get element by ID command. I was having a hard time figuring it out at first but then i realised it was small silly errors on my part.I like that we couldn't use CSS because it makes it easier to concentrate on simply java which I struggle with a lot. I like the step by step appraoch to learning code.