"A website as both the subject and object
This web needs to actually work for people instead of being powered by a small handful of big corps.- google, facebook, twitter
Artists create worlds…This is why websites are so important. They allow the author to create not only works (the “objects”) but also the world (the rooms, the arrangement of rooms, the architecture!). Ideally, the two would inform each other in a virtuous, self-perfecting loop. This can be incredibly nurturing to an artist’s practice.
Why not have a personal website that works strategically, in parallel to your other activities? How could a website complement what you already do rather than competing or repeating?
Website as a plant…but don't get too excited or set goals, that's not the idea here. Plants can't be rushed
It’s nice to be outside working on your garden, just like it’s nice to quietly sit with your ideas and place them onto separate pages
Why not consider your website a beautiful rock with a unique shape which you spent hours finding, only to throw it into the water until it hits the ocean floor? You will never know when it hits the floor, and you won’t care.
Thankfully, rocks are plentiful and you can do this over and over again, if you like. You can throw as many websites as you want into the ocean. When an idea comes, find a rock and throw it.
Instead of a cloud, let’s use a metaphor that makes the web’s individual, cooperative nodes more visible. This way, we can remember the responsibility we each have in building a better web. The web is a flock of birds or a sea of punctuation marks, each tending or forgetting about their web garden or puddle home with a river of knowledge nearby."
I think it's a beautiful thought, to consider the different metaphors that the web can take form through. The thought of creating a site feels so daunting to me, when my exposure is so oversaturated with finalized, larger than life digital productions. I enjoy the idea of witnessing the growth of a site. Witnessing the growth from room to room on a clean page, minimal advertisements, maybe there's click bait but it's original, and wildly entertaining.As the past few years have really paved priority to mutual aid, and community organizing, I think this article is more important than ever, as we consider ways to dismantle systems that are not looking out for anyone but themselves.-c
"still, how can anybody make a story about a future or an alien culture without describing, implicitly or explicitly, its technology.
Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine - and so on and on.
Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.This is not an acceptable use of the word. "Technology" and "hi tech" are not synonymous, and a technology that isn't "hi," isn't necessarily "low" in any meaningful sense. One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty "hi," is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one?
And all science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it's written by people who don't know what the word means.
All the same, I agree with my reviewer that I don't write hard science fiction. Maybe I write easy science fiction. Or maybe the hard stuff's inside, hidden — like bones, as opposed to an exoskeleton...."
I’ve held similar beliefs about technology for a while now. I feel like society has been so in awe of computers, nanotechnology, AI, phones…in a race to see who can harness these powers the fastest. While these forms of technology are no doubt surprising, worthy of admiration and appreciation for their complexity, I’ve found myself holding apprehension, starting to feel a weariness each time I open an app on my phone. I feel like I'm in the posture one makes after they’ve stumbled upon gold, but spot a very possessive, aggressive dragon sleeping around the treasure. That kind of palms up, quiet, backwards stepping motion that they do. I want to learn about the technology of nature. I want to understand the tools and skills needed to build a shelter. Or even the technology of crafting. How can I make myself a shirt from a crochet hook and some yarn? There's nothing wrong with advances in digital technology, but I think there must be an intentional respect for the many technologies in all their forms. For each ecosystem requires a delicate balance, and our handling and attitude towards “technology” may very well play an important part in our own.-c
"Handmade web pages flourished in the mid-to-late-1990s, in the brief period after the academic web and before the corporate web. ‘Handmade’ is by no means the only or best term to define the web of this period.
Olia Lialina describes the web of the mid-1990s as:
bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer... it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.
These are not artifacts of a dead web but rather, signposts on a map of a living web pointing to a web as it once was, a web in progress, a web in the making.
I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to advocate for an ongoing active engagement with the making of web pages and of web policies.
In The Web We Lost (2012), Anil Dash writes: "In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity.""
I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to draw attention both to the manual labour involved in the composition of web pages, and the functioning of the web page itself as a 'manual', a 'handbook', a set of instructions required for a computer program to run.
In today's highly commercialised web of multinational corporations, proprietary applications, read-only devices, search algorithms, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects.
The more proprietary, predatory, and puerile a place the web becomes, the more committed I am to using it in poetic and intransigent ways."
As someone who missed the Myspace era by a fraction, and landed herself in the dawn of Facebook and busy web pages hosting flash arcade games in the hundreds…I don’t think it's possible for me to hold the same nostalgia for these older web days that the author speaks so fondly. But I do agree with the author’s values, as I think there is a calm that emits from these handcrafted sites, such as J. R.’s own, and the TILDE community. Nobody is wearing a suit in these sites, briefcase full of products to sell and opinions to stutter at me, copy and pasted. There is a kindness that emits from these crafted servers, where people are so proud of their work and they’re just happy to have shared their creation with anyone who stumbles into it. -c
"In fact, we get the term "computer" from the forgotten practice of human computation. Well before computers became "personal," an entire profession of arithmetic labor (mostly women) were contracted for scientific and military production.
Life can't be reduced to binary.
The GUI software, like all computer programs, is made of code. Code is the language of the computer. Sets of instructions for how the hardwaree should manipulate stored information.
It's surprising how often you'll find connections between art, architecture, and computation. The term "design pattern" for instance, used to describe a computers repeated software elements, was first introduced to computer engineers by the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander.
"In the built environment there are also physical loops, infrastructures that move objects and information. At every level of ubranization, from city center to the most remote areas, space is connected through human-scale circuits. From shipping routes to telecommunication networks, the city breathes through these loops, circulating the people, material, and information that bring it to life."
we make lots of routes and paths within our own life. this journal requires more time for reflection, but I'm interested in how we can take these larger connections to spacial planning and think about how we want that to fit into our values, our use of the computer, our communities.-c
“The dynamics of conversations vary, from rapid-fire single-word exchanges to scrolling prose broken up by long pauses, and in these contrasts we can see the difference between the blurting out of a rumour and the divulgence of a transgression.”
“Whereas a truly instant messenger would display each and every keystroke in real time, instead we have an exchange that sits halfway between speaking and writing”
“Both social and news media seek to appeal to and produce a sense that something important is just about to happen. By exploiting anticipation and appealing to a sense of futurity, both intend to capture their audience for as long as possible. The online economy is one of attention, in which human communication is transformed into profit.”
“It’s well understood that we put on many voices or masks when broadcasting online, but what does this mean within the space of a personal chat where some ‘genuine’ character is expected?”
“The professional becomes blurred with the social. This dissolution of boundaries is symptomatic of the disappearance of fixed working hours, precarious working situations and a burgeoning ‘freelance workforce’, within which a key virtue is to be eternally available.”
“With the indefinable (or more accurately, the constantly shifting) social utility of platforms, it seems in the future it may be increasingly difficult to separate work from pleasure. This distinction is one of great importance to the individual involved but not to those profiteers of the platforms themselves, where, in fact the opposite is true and interaction at all costs is the aim.”
A barrage of notifications. Constant differentiating between category of information being shared. The many different containers we occupy, leap-frogging from tab to tab.
The anxiety around an active typing symbol
Vibrant, playful colors like a loud car saleman, promoting that we read about all the ways we are distacting and consuming ourselves. While it was speaking on some heavy, anthropolific topics, it did so without fear-mongering in the way that so many multi-media companies do to catch attention. I suppose if they had done so, they would have been just like those they were critiquing.
You are the product
I was wondering if the order of notification popups had any weighted inmpact on the navigation of the site. How was the text in each popup selected? Is it all random or meaningless? In most media formats that send notifications, the words are chosen tactifully. If the popups are completely randomized, maybe the author is offering a satire on the “meaningful messages” that companies use to target and notify the user. If they are curated and planned, what was the message?
Throbbing ellipses is a surreal way of putting it