As a high-school student diving into the vast rabbit holes of internet content connected by its relation to Harmony Korine, I stumbled upon a video that gave me an insight into the equally vast chaos of rules that govern Korine’s brain. More importantly, though, it left me with a method that was easy for me to understand, analyze and potentially use.

In the legendary status YouTube video[1] Korine is being interviewed by Chase Whale (or rather Chase Whale is unsuccessfully attempting to interview him). Right at the beginning Korine completely ignores a question about his latest movie “Thrash Humpers” and says “Well, first, one second… I’m gonna draw some dots!”. He then proceeds to explain and demonstrate his method for coming up with scenes and writing, and calls it “basically his favorite thing to do”. He proceeds on rambling that he likes to draw a bunch of dots on a whiteboard, connect them in a pattern that he claims represents “a brain of a fox” and next to the dots, he starts writing seemingly unrelated words. After the diagram is ready, what it takes is to just use the rules of grammar to start combining the words into sentences that have a syntagmatic value. One can proceed to create a sentence after sentence utilizing the power of this diagram and potentially end up with a short story. Despite first connecting the dots in a specific way there are virtually no rules and the “user” of the diagram has complete freedom to take it in any direction they want.

Seeing this video after reading about Manovich’s “Database Logic”, I connected the dots (pun intended) and realized the obvious: Korine’s method is simply an exact, dumbed-down illustration to Manovich’s theories about the database as a basis of the narrative and syntagmatic aspects of database instances. In the video, we see that from this specific database of words Korine (but possibly also virtually anyone else) unveils the potential and implicit narrative. Despite the visual “interface” of the database, the diagram has a “random-access” form and therefore the role of decoding it and extracting the syntagmatic links remains on the “user”.

This method not only serves as an exact illustration to the theory that I’m dealing with in this text and comes from Korine, whose work is also the starting point of this text. It can also serve as a great tool and reference for creating stories and narratives (potentially also visual narratives assuming a modification to the method or the form of the instances). Again: as a graphic design student, who was never academically trained in writing and narratives, I am not aware of the existence of other helper methods like this one. I assume there are many out there, but I believe that this particular method is valid and worth focusing on in the context of my research.