Ulises sees books not as containers for words, but as time-space sequences which can be separate from text. (This reads confusing but it makes sense in my head). I think what he's getting at is that writers should pay more attention to and take advantage of how their words interact with the space on a page. In that way, books, in the physical sense, would be more exciting. Adding or subtracting space can add just as much meaning as the words themselves, a technique poetry often employs. Sometimes, the text isn't even the most important part of the book e.g. some people only buy books because they look nice on their shelf. When I got to the part entitled "Language" though, I couldn't help but feel like he was losing me he said "The most beautiful and perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages... Every book of the new art is searching after that book of absolute whiteness, in the same way that every poem searches for silence." It sounds like he's just telling people to project their own thoughts on a piece of paper instead of taking the time to understand the author's thoughts, kind of like a form of nihilism where if language can't capture a person's intentions then what's the point of trying to decipher them. He also insists that the point of new reading is to solely understand the structure of the book but to me it sounds like a waste of time... I like the section on bookworks though, I'd like to see the Ulises' wallpaper book.
It's interesting that the human instinct for beauty persists even in illegal web activity. The author notes that each topsite has customized artwork and a sitebot theme to distinguish itself from others and create a high-quality "experience." Even when there seems to be a lot of camaraderie in piracy, the need for identity and belonging finds its way, leading to the creation of subcultures.
Duvall says that graphic design in the hypermodern age is "a standardization of chaos," where even though rules about grid and typography popular in the modern age have fallen away, images and text must follow a certain format of hyperlinks to exist. The standardization now lies behind the scenes in an all new medium. Duvall calls our current era "hyper modernism" -- we've moved on from the tangible world to the virtual world. In his comments on typography, I found it interesting that even though technology has made life more removed from handwritten text, it has also sought to "humanize" text again by eschewing clean, regimented typefaces like Helvetica in favor of incorporating human imperfections into typefaces.
Prior to taking this class, I knew about alt text but I'd never really considered the mechanics of writing it myself -- how short it should be, how descriptive, what style or tone it should take. I enjoyed reading the creative alt texts excerpted from Instagram. An image is worth a thousand words, so it's quite a challenge describing it to a blind person. I think the idea of alt text as poetry is very fitting because poetry is a medium that is more evocative and intertwined with space and dimension than prose.
In Metahaven's manifesto, although I found his argument hard to follow sometimes -- especially his discussion on why black is the new gold -- I thought it interesting how he noted there's a distinction between material value and functional value. This challenges what "good design" means; form no longer follows function but the object can still retain immense value. In Seth Price's Dispersion, the quote that most stroke me was "if a work of art wasn't written about and reproduced in a magazine it would have difficulty attaining the status of 'art.'" Today's art seems to rely more and more heavily on a written explanation for it to have any tangible interpretation.
This text was easier to digest than some of our other readings, as I think the content is much more tangible and less abstract or obfuscated. In particular, I enjoyed reading about Max Bill's work at the Ulm school and his own designs. I love designs that are both highly functional and clever or delightful, as exemplified by his kitchen clock-timer combo. I also like Munari's hobo symbols which take advantage of a language that is separate from written or spoken language.
I found Ramsey Nassar's discussion on programming's English-embedded nature to be thought-provoking. From the very grammar of programming languages to the way characters are encoded, everything is grounded in the English language, hurting the supposedly universal nature of programming. For a programming language to put everyone on the same playing field, we'd have to invent an entirely new set of characters distinct from an existing writing systems, a task which just seems overwhelmingly hard.
When reading Paul Saulellis' "Performing the Feed," I realized I had never thought about how fitting the word "feed" was for the constant stream of images and text that bombards us on social media. It's not really nourishment, but it feeds our desire to be stimulated, to escape boredom. Additionally, it's interesting how posting something in the digital age is no longer just a one and done event, but the initiation of a chain of postings where a post on social media can be shared or posted by many, many people.
It's amazing how far electronic music has come, from the enormous computing power taken by early IBM computers to generate just one note, to the explosion of EDM music today. Reading about how it takes ~20,000 numbers to generate the amplitude and shape of a sound wave emitted from a computer is mind-boggling and it makes me question how it can be that we can boil down a divine experience like music to hard numbers, like it almost seems a bit sacrilegious.
I really like Wolfe's essay on how her disability has forced her to reconsider her relationship with time and space, how moving at a slower pace is both a blessing and a curse. I feel like society is so obsessed with productivity and being in the "flow;" we kill ourselves to push out deliverables faster and faster and get annoyed at the slightest delay in load time. But in the end, what's the point of constantly being busy, like if everyone agreed to move at a slower pace maybe we'd sacrifice efficiency but we'd get more enjoyment out of life, which I think is more worthwhile.
The piece of Chun's article that struck me most was her saying how programming became programming when men shifted from commanding women to commanding computers (incidentally, the first "computers" were women). It's very interesting thinking about how women were the original software; they had to physically interact with the hardware to carry out instructions. Also, I very well understand how Chun noted that computers ruthlessly obey instructions to the point where unlike humans, they cannot presume what the programmer might've meant, thus programmers have to be able to anticipate all possible outcomes. Battistoni's essay introduced me to the optimists who believe that all natural materials can be substituted therefore natural scarcity isn't an issue. I think that while human-made technology is incredibly powerful, there is a limit to it and it's way too optimistic to believe that we can manufacture nature to avoid concerning ourselves with our destruction of the Earth.
I think it's really powerful how researchers can use computers models to find solutions to giant problems in the world. But as the book mentioned, there are a lot of caveats, including the caution that problems shouldn't be fitted to models. I always think back to how computer models trained on faulty data to try and predict where crimes would happen in a neighborhood failed miserably.