visual-iconic.
The Internet alongside economic neoliberalism has completely shaken these seeming truths. Who would have predicted ten years ago that major youth culture media would not be some hypermediated mutation of MTV, but SMS, Twitter, and Facebook? Even MTV’s de-facto successor, YouTube, cannot be used by the illiterate because of keyword tagging, commenting, and searching (same with Flickr, the leading Internet platform for still images).
This requisite computer literacy in fact means a massive resurgence of symbolic literacy – the revival of a more or less classical concept of reading following a cultural and economic logic of compression. That is, reading and writing alphabetical text is often the most compressed and therefore efficient way of rapidly processing information, a notion explored early on in the Middle Ages when monks read texts without speaking them aloud. Now, in the form of e-mail and related types of electronic communication, reading and writing has taken over the workplace and dissolved the difference between work and home, between being fixed in space and hitting the road.
The symbol-centric, mobile medium of the text page has overtaken telecommunication, but instead of the monk’s contemplative codex, we find a second wave of industrialization and escalation of workplace efficiency.
Florian Cramer is director of the Piet Zwart Institute and head of the research programme Communication in a Digital Age.
'Florian Cramer having received about 30 work- related e-mail messages while writing this text.'
11. Where Do You Read? – Sean Dockray
I read where I am but sometimes I'd rather read where you are. I'd rather sit on your lap and have you read to me. I want to see what you underline and I want to know why. I want to know what's behind those words you're jotting down in the margins. Why are you looking in the index now? Is that another book? Are you taking a break? How many pages do you read at once? In what order do you read them? I want your reading to be my reading, I want to have your reading because the text is good yes, but only as good as sheet music, while what you have is virtuosity. I want to be there when you read, not when you write, but when you read, although I know that you can't read without writing, neither can I. We write when we read and we read when we write, sometimes I’m not sure if this is my breath or yours, or somebody else’s and I’m not sure that it matters anyway.
Sean Dockray is founder of AAAARG.org, an online archive of texts, as well as founder of the first Public School, a project initiated by Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles .
12. Pancake – Paulien Dresscher
When, in 2007, I decided to resume studying after a break of 15 years, I discovered with a shock that I could no longer write without a computer. After days of thorough preparation, I entered the lecture hall to sit my first exam. When it started, I began industriously writing things down, but I quickly encountered problems. The second sentence didn’t flow well, it had to be reversed; I crossed it out and started again, turned the sentence around and then went on to the second paragraph. This also turned into a mess. I went to get fresh paper and threw a worried glance at the clock: I had already lost twenty minutes. A slight panic crept over me. Could I handle it?
My concern was not only that I apparently had become so stunted by cut-and-paste tools that linear text production seemed now virtually impossible, but also that the whole process preceding this – ordering my thoughts and formulating arguments – couldn’t take place without ten finger tips subtly leaning, gliding, typing over the qwerty keyboard, with the Internet browser, spell checker, and thesaurus within easy reach. Even more confusion arose in me from the realization that I hadn’t even noticed that I had changed this much.
Just as Socrates was concerned that the invention of writing would make people forgetful, people today are worried about the degree to which we are permanently shaped by digital technologies. The playwright Richard Foreman recently expressed his concern about digital dependency in his suggestion that we are on our way to becoming ‘pancake people’, in contrast to those who are cursed with a more ‘complex, dense, and cathedral-like’ mental structure. The pancake people are ‘wide and thin’, connected to the network of information, while the cathedral people have internalized a personal vision on the world.
The contrast between the words pancake and cathedral is deliberately humorous, but it is also normative. It ignores the multitude of possibilities that the Internet offers us and the irreversibility of media change. A subtle awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of digitality is crucial.
Although, according to Foreman, I have, in recent years, developed into a networking pancake – and probably a lot more besides me – I still now and then go to a meeting in good spirits with a writing pad. I can’t prevent my hand involuntarily, but with a certain regularity, moving to the bottom of the paper page to check a phantom mouse pad, to see whether there are any messages or in order to look up something. These days, I deprogram my body more regularly and flick the online switch to ‘off’ sometimes. By the way – I passed that exam.
Paulien Dresscher is head of New Media at Cinekid, advisor E-Culture at the Netherlands Film Fund, filmmaker, and researcher.
13. Between Reality and the Impossible: Revisited – Dunne and Raby
'What human beings are and will become is decided in the shape of our tools no less than in the action of statesmen and political movements. The design of technology is thus an ontological decision fraught with political consequences.’*
What happens when you uncouple design from the marketplace, when, rather than making technology sexy, easy to use, and more consumable, designers use the language of design to pose questions, inspire, and provoke – to transport our imaginations into parallel but possible worlds?
The projects in this exhibition** focus on designing interactions between people and technology on many different levels. They are concerned not only with the expressive, functional, and communicative possibilities of new technologies, but also with the social, cultural, and ethical consequences of living within an increasingly technologically mediated society. They explore new ways in which design can make technology more meaningful and relevant to our lives, both now and in the future, by thinking not only about new applications but their implications as well, both positive and negative.
The futurologist Stuart Candy uses a wonderful diagram to clarify how we think about futures. Rather than one amorphous space of futureness, it is divided into 'probable', 'preferable', 'plausible', and 'possible' futures. One of the most interesting zones is 'preferable'. Of course, the very definition of preferable is problematic – who decides? But, although designers shouldn’t decide for everyone else, we can play a significant role in discovering what is and what isn’t desirable.
To do this, we need to move beyond designing for the way things are now and begin to design for how things could be, imagining alternative possibilities and different ways of being, and giving tangible form to new values and priorities. Designers cannot do this alone, though, and the projects here benefit from dialogues and consultations with people working in other fields such as ethics, philosophy, political science, life sciences, and biology.
The idea of probable, preferable, plausible, and possible futures – the space between reality and the impossible – allows designers to challenge design orthodoxy and prevailing technological visions so that fresh perspectives can begin to emerge. The exhibition is absolutely not about prediction, but about asking 'what if', speculating, imagining, and even dreaming in order to encourage debate about the kind of technologically mediated world we wish to live in – hopefully, one that reflects the complex, troubled people we are, rather than the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be.
Dunne and Raby is a design studio run by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.
Andrew Feenberg, [1991] 2002 Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford : Oxford University Press. (p. 3)
This text was originally written for the catalogue of the Biennale Internationale Design 2010 Saint-Étienne.
14. Weapons of Mass Distraction – Sven Ehmann
I love reading. That is why I took three books along on a recent vacation. Three books that I picked carefully from my library and was sure to enjoy: poetry by Ossip Mandelstam, an early Pynchon, and Fragebogen (questionnaires) by Max Frisch. No recent popstar author, no must-read non-fiction title, just books for my pleasure. In the end I read none of them. Instead I decided-surprised and almost frightened-that not reading would make an even better holiday. Instead of gathering more input, I gave myself a break, time to think, time to contemplate, time to forget.
We are in a period of data-rush. Getting information is banal. Data is gathered, processed, and available anywhere, anytime. It can be very useful or very annoying, but finding the time, capacity, and tools for making sense out of the data-for the moment as well as the foreseeable future-is the real challenge. That is why I so very much appreciate the work of dedicated professionals like journalists and editors. Or a new kind of professional that The Economist described in a special report entitled ‘Data, data everywhere’ in February 2010 as 'the data scientist, … [who] combines the skills of software programmer, statistician, and storyteller, [working as an] artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden in mountains of data.' I praise these authors, curators, and designers who make the effort of turning information into an experience for me as the reader.
What inspires me the most right now is the field of data visualization, information graphics, and visual storytelling as it can be found in publications such as the Italian supplement IL. A new breed of data journalist is passionately working to find appropriate, understandable, and entertaining visual representations for complex datasets or processes. Having said that, I feel that-despite the popularity of the phrase 'a picture is worth a thousand words'-visuals are not always understandable and easy to read. We are challenged to
