After Digital…
The Information Super highway is now more than 20 years old and is beginning to show some wear and tear.
Like early Modernist architecture, the internet has been built on the metaphor of speed, creating a landscape of strip cities made up of internet servers. Yet, whereas architecture creates a powerful topography – the skyline – digital servers remain anonymous - their presence almost unnoticed - mostly underground, bunkered and sealed from the day to day.
And now….
Speaking to a colleague the other day, he asked: what happens when digital technology becomes middle-aged? And this is the point: in a speeded up digital world the technology has already reached its ‘middle-age’ crisis; so many of its dreams, offspring and partnerships have either failed, died or taken up lives of their own. What we are seeing – and limitedlanguage is part of this phenomenon – is a moment of reflection, a wistful interlude where we see a proliferation of blogs which, like Victorian journal entries, try to make sense of the times. Then it was the Industrial revolution, now a more ‘velvet’ technological one where digital design materialises, as once the Arts and Crafts movement did, in the hand-made and the organic; the tactile; the sensual and the interactive.
In the twenty first century this is not an attempt to reject, but to humanise, the digital – we are awaiting the outcomes…
your comment
I tend to disagree with your view to identify the ‘velvet’technology with art and craft movement. To me the tactile
products of the disital age seems more of abandonment of humanism rather than praise of it. What differentiates human
from animals, in my opinion, is the ability to create a narrative. And this is what lacks in ‘velvet’technology.
I am imagining ipod as a good example of it, for it is invented to ‘personalize’ the huge amount of tunes produced and consumed in the every minute basis. Yet because it has easy access to internet, has huge memory you can never fill up and function that automatically shuffle songs, we end up drawn in the sea of high and low culture musics.
(it speeds up the process of low absorbed into high and be nutralised, consumed and disposed)
They rather appear to me the process of deta-basing human senses. They make us realise our choises, likes and dislikes are not as secred as it used to be, but the result of a combination of incidents that possibly are re-and
deconstructable.
I am not sure if there was something special in art and craft movement to differentiate from today’s cuddly technology though…
Will we be able to create something beyond momentary ‘nice’ out of the velvet technology??
/Anonymous 15/05/2005