Last week’s supervision meeting perhaps left me more confused than when I went in. Such is the nature of these things. I had become too perscriptive and got ahead of myself by trying to rationalise outcomes rather than letting the process happen.
Points to take home:
• Building the context is important, don’t throw that part away.
• Context is perhaps more interesting than system/process, though you need both.
• This whole thing is very fine arts – however fine artists wouldn’t tolerate the ‘code’ aspect of it? Hmm.. I think this assertion is fundamentally wrong, fine artists use code and generative material all the time, it’s not seen as ‘too technical’. Take Robert Hodgin for instance.
• There seems to be this bent towards the theory of group formation.
Did help clarify one objective though: I want to make the tools/situations in which people can make things – not some dead material artefact.
So in this space of making some sort of context or process that is agentive, I need to discern what it is for. Is it about the democratisation of design? Political democracy? Somewhere between the two? I think between these two, or one as allegory for the other, there is some reasonably fertile ground – how can interfaces, as extensions of human consciousness, act as political agents?
I was also directed to check out Clay Shirley (Here Comes Everyone), who discusses the ways that social media/the internet solves the old-world communication paradigms of bi-directionality and group formation. He also talks about how the social effects of technology only really become interesting once the technology is embedded in the culture. How do I make things that require the technology, but aren’t necessarily about it?
