First of all, did you know there was a show called Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention?
I didn't, but now I wish I got bbc1 so I could watch it. Anyhoo, Theo Jansen builds wind-powered sand creatures. We've discussed early, non-digital computers, so I think I can include these beesties on my blog. A few thoughts: 1. They are amazingly beautiful. It has to do with being able to see the mechanics of their skeletons; they move as fluidly as biological organisms but look like machines. I like being able to see the complex series of physical algorithms that must be executed in order to achieve motion. 2. Jansen refers to them as animals and hopes that one day they will be able to "live" on their own on the beach. He's constructed ones that can detect when they hit water, and reverse motion, and ones that detect when a storm is coming and peg themselves to the ground. 3. This makes me think about a different sort of participatory art. Not art that people participate in, but art that participates. You know? We've talked a little bit about artificial intelligence, and Grosser presented to us his painting machine that arguable has its own creative agency. I think Jansen's sand animals bring up a similar idea, that of the machine as thinking organism. Living art. Only with these, they would potentially exist as a community, a herd on the beach. Maybe they could even be designed to make art of their own? Sand sculptures? 4. Of course what sets these apart is that they are powered solely by the wind. So the source of creative agency is the earth itself, in a much more direct way than usual.
I liked all of the pieces that Ben Grosser presented in class on Thursday, but found I could relate in particular to "Reload the Love!" I have thought before about how the aesthetics of Facebook condition us. First, there's that soft warm blue theme. That's the same color they paint on the inside of insane asylums to calm the patients down. And then bam! It's punctuated with an exciting pinch of hot orange-red, a chip of chocolate in the vanilla theme. I am entirely aware of how my eyes are magnetized to the top right-hand corner of the screen every time I load my Facebook page; of the fact that I get a little rush each time I see one of those little red virtual goodies light up. But I never really thought about the totally consumerist pattern of the Facebook notification system. As Grosser points out the crucial thing about notification is that once you click on them, the exciting red number goes away. It works exactly the same as any other mechanism that powers the consumer-culture machine: it conditions you to want something that is short-lived, so that you buy into a system that will supply you with more. So, it conditions you to want notifications -- and the way to get notifications is to post frequently. Facebook thrives off of people posting; the more posts they make, the more time they spend on the site, the more ads they click on, the more brand-pages they "share." That's all pretty obvious when you think about it but what I like about Grosser's piece is how he hones in on one tiny detail about web-design that essentially powers the whole beast. I think it's a beautiful example of, to use his words "how software [in this case, UI design] prescribes behaviors." It's also intensely creepy. In the past, I've put myself on Facebook-post hiatuses in order to limit my opportunities for time-wastage. It's a lot more boring if you never get any notifications. Now when I do that I will with the consciousness that I'm resisting their system. Which I suppose I can use as an excuse for complying with it in the first place.
Mark Amerika's piece Grammatron got me thinking of other uses hyperlink in text I've seen. Most notable is some of the work my one of my creative writing professors, Ander Monson, who apparently in his former life was a hacker but now is an essayist/fiction-writer/poet dude. One of Ander's preferred ideas is that of the labyrinth, which he applies to his work in various ways. One of his volumes of poetry, The Available World has a companion site , which, like Amerika's piece, uses hyperlinks to create a webby, non-linear literary experience (though I'd contest the classification of Grammatron as literary). Monson's site can be read alone, but it is best experienced as a companion to the physical volume. The website includes some poems that are in the book, and some that aren't. What I can make from Monson's interest in pairing web and page (which he does with another book, an essay collection, in a different format) is something about non-linearity. I'm still going through it in my head. When you read a book, it's like following a thread. You know that you will see everything the thread sees; even if it doesn't tell you everything, you'll know you read everything it had to say. But a website is different. Part of the fun, and the stress, of reading on the web is the constant need to (literally and figuratively) keep tabs on everything. What are you missing? Where did you start and where did you end? Did you find what you were looking for or forget about it completely? So what does Monson want to do by offering us both? I'd probably have to read The Available World a couple more times. As I mentioned in my first post, with poetry form has got interact with content, and I'm still absorbing the poems themselves. But I like the interactivity of his website; the responsibility, you might say, that it puts on the reader to be explore the labyrinth; to make their own adventure.
