Kids setting out collections of stones or little soldiers on a table are at the same time attentive to their aesthetic detail, how realistic, how variable the faces, as to how great their ability to inflict real or ideas of damage. The software feeds into the natural delight that people take in analytical sorting or in extrapolating from imagined or actual patterns. The eye-hand strays and picks at this and that, producing connotations of meaning by the simple fact of linkage, of little tokens, tenderness, tat. It is a machine for producing a form of montage which is more like a game of dominoes than a dialectic. A structure that in itself is fairly limited, particularly in size, becomes with the possibility of reiteration a far more powerful means of linkage.
Collections become collectivities.
This is not to say that Linker could not be used as a space for the operation of such procedures. Perhaps we even remain in hope that things could be that algorithmically simple. The software even explicitly provides a domain in which such devices, such rule-fantasies can be played out without harming the public. Constraints, of formal rules, of available materials, of rhyme and metre, of rythms are familiar tools for meanings to trick themselves into being made. Adoption of a constraint paradoxically allows creation to become a process.