Boredom, b’dumb, b’dumb…
Communication. It is an easy word. It slips off the tongue without a thought. It is with us all the time: the scribbled note pinned on a door to say ‘back in 5’, the jerky prose of the txt, or that blinking on-off banner advertisement on every website (but not this one).
But what does it take to slow us down? Or look hard and think carefully? In a world of fast communication, words and images seek us out. They seem to be irrepressibly alive. Writing about the ability of a young office worker to sing the tin-pan alley hits of the day, Siegfried Kracauer observed ‘But it is not she who knows every hit, rather the hits know her, steal up behind her and gently lay her low.’ That was 1929: today our pop commodities are more aggressive. Do you recall the ‘accidental’ exposure of a pumped-up breast during the Super Bowl intermission? Or the ‘spontaneous’ outpourings of emotion triggered by the death of a Polish Pope?
Communication is now the business of shock and awe. But of course real affect cannot be pre-progammed. It acts by accident and with stealth. Think of those snapshots of American soldiers with the instinctive ‘thumbs up and smile’ gesture hovering over a corpse. The awful pixilated blur hiding a beaten face. The shock lay in the apparent innocence of these products of the photographic reflex.
So in a world of visual noise, where might we find a quiet invitation to look and to think? Might it be possible for graphic design to operate as a system to slow down perception to create silences in the noisy media world? Or perhaps even stillness - this is simply just another tool, another technique. What is the alternative to the heady stimulation of communication? What happens, asked Kracauer, if we allow ourselves to become truly and deeply bored: ‘if one has the patience, the sort of patience specific to legitimate boredom, then one experiences a kind of bliss that its almost unearthly … in ecstasy you name what you have always lacked.’ What is it that you have always lacked? Have you ever been bored enough to find out?
David Crowley
I have noticed recently how people in face to face conversation glance furtively at their silent mobile phones, almost like a nervous tick, you see people looking at their phone, brushing its face, pushing at the numbers, moving it from hand to hand or just placed on the bar, cafe table or wherever – sitting like a benign member to the conversation. This behaviour, I think, reflects a contemporary position towards boredom, in our ‘wired’ world, boredom is associated with being out of touch, not part of the wired loop made up of texts, emails, Wifi, chat rooms etc. In its most extreme form boredom is synonymous with being alone! Post 1990’s, we are allowed ‘down-time’ but the Romantic notion of loneliness is now seen as almost socio-pathological – being in a constant state of ‘connectedness’ is a modern day defence against being alone… In italy there is a ‘slow food’ movement, maybe a similar movement in graphic design might introduce us to the spiritual qualities of boredom…?
/Anonymous 07/05/2005