A Website is a Shifting House
“How could a website complement what you already do rather than competing or repeating? How can you make it fun or thought-provoking or (insert desired feeling here) for you? How can the process of making and cultivating a website contribute to your approach?”
A website could complement what I’m already doing without competing or repeating by adapting what i’m doing to the web. Something that lives in “the real world” doesn’t have the same needs as something living in the web.
Desired Feeling(s): Productive, joyous, excited.
How to achieve desired feelings: firstly by learning and understanding web, and secondly by adapting to web while still maintaining what i already enjoy (physicality) about my work.
The tedium of making a website is very similar to my existing process.
A Rant About Technology
My girlfriend, Abby, to her steering wheel: “what even is this!? Like who made this!?”
-to the textures in the pleather: “look at this. Like how did they do that?”
Wasn’t talking about the car (the fighter jet), but specifically the steering wheel (the linen, paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills)
A Handmade Web
“I evoke the term 'handmade web' to suggest slowness and smallness as a forms of resistance.”
I relate to this with my own textile practice, and it’s very funny to me how much this reading relates to my passion website which is based on slow living.
Treating old web pages as not just old, dead artifacts, but things that are still living in the web as reminders, as nostalgia, as avocation and resistance.
Hello, World!
"the first computers were human"
towards the end of this chapter, Choi makes the comparison of computers to cities. noting that computers had an architecture to them, and cities have a life or a flow to them through man-made systems like shipping routes. But could the same metaphor be made about computers and bodies? is a computer bodily?
I bring up this metaphor because I feel as if I almost see computers as an entity. for example, my mom has named her iPad Bessie, and my laptop is a "she."
A Friend Is a Writing
"every line can be revised until it is sent"
"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"
I've actually thought a lot about this idea of revision when texting. I remember in high school, I felt like I needed space in between each response in any conversation, text or not. I just needed a minute to think and decide what the exact best possible response was. I felt the semi-immediacy of a back-and-forth text conversation gave me just enough time for revisions, and allowed me to be the wittiest version of myself possible. There was no need to think back on what I should have said in a certain moment, because I was able to take that extra few moments and make those extra few revisions.
"the online economy is one of attention"
There's an expected immediacy to everything online, even I notice myself growing impatient when something is buffering too long or someone takes too long to type out their response to me.
The Poetry of Tools
I've decided to focus on Alexei Shulgin's Form Art from 1997.
I feel like it would be extremely difficult to experience this piece in the same way more than once. This is why I was drawn to it, it has an exploratory aspect as well as an expanseiveness. One would have to be very deliberate if they wanted to experience every single little button or pop-up. But what's great about this website is that it's not about each little button or pop-up, but this game-like web object that they all make up together.
The Internet’s Back-to-the-Land Movement
I find it interesting that the timeline of the web is reflective of the timeline of humanity in some ways. This reading compares WELL to the communes of the 70s, as a community driven platform that eventually gets driven out due to capitalism and other hierarchal systems. I feel like the original web was communal and open-source, but has now been taken over by "the system."
This reading also brought up for me the idea of servers. I've been wanting to have my own website, but I have almost no knowledge about servers. This reading reminded me that by buying a domain, I'm renting a server, which is in a completely different place than me and my laptop are. It felt for me weirdly intrusive on my part, as having something that takes up space somewhere else, like buying a storage unit that's on the other side of the world, and I had this image in my head of a server as an apartment building, and me buying a little apartment for my little website in a city of servers somwhere.
The Good Room
I think it's interesting that the technology that the author observes to have soul, like meditation apps, apps that feature art, or work out apps, are also all monetized and commercial. Calm and Spotify both require payment, in fact a lifetime subscription to Calm is $399.99. I feel like in this sense these apps aren't really comporable to the library he writes about, because all that's needed to use those spaces is a bag check. And although social media apps are commercialized, and also are shown to cause regret and displeasure, they are free to use. I feel like both of these things are kind of trapping the user to use one over the other. I would rather scroll through Instagram for "free" (but we all know it's not really that free) than pay for a monthly subscription to Audible.