Car Metaphors
Speaking of skeuomorphs, here is Olia Lialina’s blog on analogies and metaphors in discussions about the Web and computers.
I teach Interface Design and Digital Cultures at a design school. Its a great job. The only thing that poisons my professional life are the numerous analogies I read every day in articles on new media and computer related topics.
The most popular analogy contemporary authors use to explain the computer’s development and its role in our life is to cars. In this blog, the car and other metaphors and comparisons will be collected. The examples will be in Russian, English and German, annotated and commented on in English.
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What’s wrong with car metaphors and analogies in general?
Many of them are evil by themselves. When you do not have weighty arguments, when you are are not able to explain or grasp something, you can use an analogy.
To compare computers with cars, in particular, is wrong because it’s a huge simplification, the role of of computers in society and individual life is more complex than the role of cars.
The notion that today everybody has a computer and a car and “once, cars were new as well” is not enough to put an equal sign in between two phenomena.
One of Marshal McLuhan’s most famous quotes is:
When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future…
– (The Medium is the Massage)
This insight from the late 1960s becomes more annoying each day. Maybe it would help to regard it as a neutrally observed fact instead of an instruction on how to deal with new situations.
Also, computers are not so new anymore. Most misunderstandings and clumsy metaphors about computers do not appear because the computer is an unknown thing, but because a lot of knowledge about it is not present and metaphors have become the main mode of interaction with a computer.
In 2004, in her introduction to the 2nd edition of “The Second Self”, Sherry Turkle made a wise remark about the popular cars/computers parallels:
It takes as a given that people once knew how their cars, televisions, or telephones worked and don’t know this any more, but that in the case of mechanical technology, such losses are acceptable. It insists however, that ignorance about the fundamentals of computation comes at too high a price.
See also Idioms.
Constant Dullart talks with Rhizome about his upcoming piece Terms of Service:
The seeming lack of political positioning of these large corporate entities is something that benefits the approachability, the cleanliness of the image, emphasizes fake neutrality and the overall reputation that the companies build to gain the users’ trust . But this does not mean that very important political decisions aren’t being made by these commercially oriented multinational companies, involving everyone’s access to information. The interests of corporations supplying tools that are used by everyone like water, but are being designed to make a profit have fascinated me for a long time. And the politics behind it become even more clear through vaguely described Terms of Services open to legal interpretation.
See also: the revolving internet.
I assume that the Voicemail icon is supposed to be evocative of reel to reel tapes but it always look like a container of 110 Film. I suspect my voicemail is no longer stored on spooled magnetic tape. No, you’ve never seen either of these before, young person. #getoffmylawn
From Alexei Shulgin’s Desktop Is, 1998.
desktop is the main element of a human - machine interface
desktop is your window to the digital world
desktop is your first step into virtual reality
desktop is a reflection of your individuality
desktop is your everyday visual environment
desktop is an extension of your organs
desktop is the face of your computer
desktop is your everyday torture and joy
desktop is your own little masterpiece
desktop is your castle
desktop is a seducer
desktop is a reliever
desktop is your enemy
desktop is your friend
desktop is a psychoanalyst
desktop is your little helper
desktop is your link to other people
desktop is a device for meditation
desktop is the membrane that mediates transactions between client and server
desktop is a substitute for so many other things
desktop is a question
desktop is the answer
DESKTOP IS
The First International Online Desktop Exhibition
http://www.easylife.org/desktop
October 20 1997 - April 20 1998
Thanks to all participants!
Alexei Shulgin
See also Desktop Views. Via Ben Fino-Radin’s interview for LOC’s the Signal blog.
E-Book backup, Jesse England, ongoing.
E-book backup is a physical, tangible, human readable copy of an electronically stored novel. The purchased contents of an e-book reader were easily photocopied and clip-bound to create a shelf-stable backup for the benefit of me, the book consumer. I can keep it on my bookshelf without worry of remote recall. A second hardcover backup has been made with the help of an online self-publishing house.
In 2009, some Amazon Kindle users found their copy of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm had been removed from their Kindles without their prior knowledge or consent; those particular copies were offered for sale by a publisher who did not have the proper rights to do so. After consumers spoke out about having a book taken from them without their consent, Amazon later reinstated the copies taken from those who purchased the book or offered gift cards as compensation for the inconvenience, and promised never to repeat such an event in the future.
Insidious changes in culture often occur quite slowly. Will all content providers be as kindly and apologetic in a future where the majority of content can be remotely controlled?
…
In most instances, I think new electronic media is wonderful. For all their disadvantages, streaming and on-demand media has enabled young or amateur content creators to compete with established publishers unlike ever before. Older or out-of-print works can be newly disseminated with little overhead. I do not fear electronic media; I fear an invisible hand ever at the ready to pull back what I have already purchased for my self.
See also: Video sharing site, 2012. Via Rhizome.
Three-part series from Domus
Rafael Rozendaal, Onwards
Part of the Apache Projects (FB page), an “open source exhibition site est. December 2011,” in Mother Neff State Park, Moody, TX.
Nate Hitchcock, the curator/creator of the Apache Projects, is one of the guest discussants this week on empyre (which you should subscribe to!). Here’s his opening spiel on the project:
I should haves stated this earlier: Apache Projects is not affiliated with the park or the department of Texas Parks and Wildlife in any formal way. I have been allowed to install works there with the permission of the park rangers.
The website for the park is written a little poorly.. I am not sure how the park appeared in the 1930s when it was completed but that what they are calling a restoration to a historical setting seems ridiculous to me since a to restore a landscape essentially turns it into a garden and requires a huge amount of upkeep.
At the info section of Apacheprojects.com I transcribed the text from a plaque near the entrance of the cave but I don’t particularly agree with the way everything is worded.. I think the use of the term “prehistoric” seems a little strange and insensitive as well.
The title “Apache Projects” comes from a few sources that are directly related to colonization.
The first and most straight forward explanation for the title is that I am 1/8th Apache (nonpracticing) and is in part a tip of the hat to my grandfather and the west Texas Apache tribes who were nomads and
violent squatters.
I use the Apache server logo on the website because I believe that the Internet is coming off the screen (through installation and more so through several projects in the works) and into a cave in this case. The cave hosts web in its physical form.
In a sense the artists are colonizing the cave for themselves with the artwork. Any parasite projects somewhat colonizes an area or site. An example might by logos and advertising. Colonization seems to be working a new way these days because of mobility. It is temporary. People are moving from place to place finding work or on vacation etc, but they don’t stay there for too long. They take up residence or real estate in a place, make an impact locally, take in what they will and move on again.
The Internet and the artworks made for it work in a similar way.. or we work in a similar way when we browse. A piece attracts our time and attention for a little while, we internalize it, change our views of the world and we move on.
Future exhibitions will deal more specifically with the movement of forms between the realities of hyperspace and the physical. A burial site seems to me to be a good location for this to happen; the artwork and Internet will be given a new life in the physical world, like reincarnation. After an exhibition the work will be removed and the cave will return to its former state, like a plant growing or a flash loop.
![I was lucky enough to go to a talk with Ricardo Dominguez last week and I am still thinking about it, about his commitment to the Web as a public space, about the legacy of Critical Art Ensemble, about how long he has been in the field, about how much of what he and Electronic Disturbance Theater pioneered that has become part of the common language of technopolitics, about his insistence on aesthetic discourse even though all his work is political, about the value of not being anonymous/Anonymous online, about making the FBI engage in conversations about poetry.
Here are the readings that were distributed before the talk, for your own edification!
Sustenance: A Play for All Trans [ ] Borders, Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab
“Digital Zapatistas,” Jill Lane
“Border Hacks: Electronic Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Immigration,” Rita Raley, from her book Tactical Media](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2u8d3cbaL1qzekkuo1_400.jpg)
I was lucky enough to go to a talk with Ricardo Dominguez last week and I am still thinking about it, about his commitment to the Web as a public space, about the legacy of Critical Art Ensemble, about how long he has been in the field, about how much of what he and Electronic Disturbance Theater pioneered that has become part of the common language of technopolitics, about his insistence on aesthetic discourse even though all his work is political, about the value of not being anonymous/Anonymous online, about making the FBI engage in conversations about poetry.
Here are the readings that were distributed before the talk, for your own edification!
right: No se lo digas a nadie by Jaime Bayly; left pirated copy with two extra chapters added by an anonymous writer. Bought in Lima Peru, The Piracy Collection
The Piracy Project has a great article up at Rhizome: The Impermanent Book. What was missing from the conversation about Jonathan Franzen’s weird diatribe against e-books, they say,
was the fact that technology has also violently altered printed books in a way from which there is no return. We are so disconnected from the means of production that nobody seems to be aware that books are produced very differently then they were 100 years ago. Digital files are exchanged between writers, publishers and printers all over the world.
Pirated books, altered books, publishing on demand, the devalued “edition,” etc. I found the section on pirated Chinese compilations/anthologies fascinating:
China is not only inundated with pirated versions of western books (which many suspect may be simply cases of printers printing extra copies of the originals) but it also has generated an interesting number of “curators,” who select material from all these different publications and collate new volumes – a bizarre reflection of internet content curators.
Via Annie.
The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry
Ahh let’s all go to the Sackner Archive/Museum/house in Miami:
Ruth and Marvin Sackner founded the Archive in Miami Beach, Florida in 1979, later moving it to Miami, Florida in 2005. Its initial mission was to establish a collection of books, critical texts, periodicals, ephemera, prints, drawings, collages, paintings, sculptures, objects, manuscripts, and correspondence dealing with precedent and contemporary, internationally produced, concrete and visual poetry.
Dream life:
We have retained copies of the correspondence to and from dealers, curators, artists, poets and critics since the collection was formed. None of this correspondence has yet been catalogued. Yes! The Sackners do all the cataloging of their collection. We chose to call our collection an ‘Archive’ because an Archive includes correspondence, documentation and ephemeral material as well as core items of the collection. With the growth of the collection, the Sackner Archive took on features of an Archive of Archives. This direction might have subconsciously originated from our attendance at the blockbuster exhibitions held at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris: PARIS-NEW YORK (1977), PARIS-BERLIN 1900-1933 (1978), PARIS-MOSCOU, 1900-1930 (1979), and PARIS-PARIS 1937-1957 (1981). The wealth of background (archival) material was an eye-opener to us. It brought life to these inanimate works and put them into matters of the moment that often uncovered unforeseen links to others. We have enjoyed cultivating personal contacts with artists and poets or their relatives and friends whose works constitute an Archive beginning with the multi-dimensional artist, Tom Phillips, in 1975 and still ongoing today. Such documentation may be found in our catalogue (1986) published in an edition of 500 copies that unfortunately is long out of print and the movie ‘Concrete!’(2003) made by our daughter, Sara Sackner, that is available on DVD and on streaming video.
The documentary is here on UbuWeb. Selected categories of work in the Sackner Archive include: Concrete Poets, Visual Poetic Artist Books, Handwritten Artist Books, Anthologies, Typewriter Poets, Compilers of Assemblings, Archive of Correspondence, Micrography, Rubberstamping, Mail Art and Artist’s Stamps, and Performance Poetry. They have a huge amount of artists’ books. Their online database’s list of classification authorities is wonderful. There is no contact information on the site.
![I was lucky enough to go to a talk with Ricardo Dominguez last week and I am still thinking about it, about his commitment to the Web as a public space, about the legacy of Critical Art Ensemble, about how long he has been in the field, about how much of what he and Electronic Disturbance Theater pioneered that has become part of the common language of technopolitics, about his insistence on aesthetic discourse even though all his work is political, about the value of not being anonymous/Anonymous online, about making the FBI engage in conversations about poetry.
Here are the readings that were distributed before the talk, for your own edification!
Sustenance: A Play for All Trans [ ] Borders, Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab
“Digital Zapatistas,” Jill Lane
“Border Hacks: Electronic Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Immigration,” Rita Raley, from her book Tactical Media](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2u8d3cbaL1qzekkuo1_1280.jpg)
