Some parts of this version took me way too long. Like the photoshop pop-ups, esp. the one about Sado-anarchism (look for it)
I can’t tell if this looks cool or if it looks hopelessly amateurish. Layout/visual feedback would be appricated.
It starts here: http://www.pinkoscopies.org/jed/An%20Ahistory%20of%20Violence/Cover.html
I uploaded a .zip of it here for Sturgeon: http://www.pinkoscopies.org/jed/
Wow, man… “Amateurish” or not, I think it’s a really exciting form. You should teach me how to do that! That’s really well done. I hope you don’t mind, I told my folks about it. Congrats and good job–when will this be live?
September 17th, 2007 | #
OK, I guess that it won’t be up on bigbridge.org until January. So I get to work on it. As I go back through it, it needs a lot of work.
September 22nd, 2007 | #
Hey Jed - I basically turned my brain off this summer, so I’m sorry that I didn’t get through your work until just now. I agree with John Paul, I think the form is very exciting. I don’t think its amateurish - I think it hearkens back to the days of the early web in a fascinating way. There is a revolution hidden in the html form, which in the beginning of the web was evident to people like Chris Marker - but html, this new language, has been so heavily commodified (i.e. naturalized) that we now hardly recognize its still untapped potential. I’m glad that you’re pushing this medium in a direct way, because you’re pushing directly against the blanket of usability that has descended upon it from these mythical places like Google and Silicon Valley.
I appreciate the rawness of your piece, and I hope you pirated the software that you used to create it - or better yet, are using open source software (by the way, Pinko’s runs on open source blogware, using the 1991 GNU License).
One question that I had in my own head was about your decision to make the essay linear. I love the pop-ups (another example of how you are directly pushing against the commodification of the internet). I think the pop-ups add a nice pause, this kind of contemplative moment that takes you out of progression to some extent and exposes the form. The rollovers achieve the same effect, although more in a surprising way.
I think the final page is unnecessary, and actually takes away from the rest of the piece. I think I see where you’re coming from/going with it, maybe trying to distance the reader (user?) from the text and yourself from the text as well. But I think it’s self abating in a bad way, and the rest of the essay, in its very form, exposes itself and denaturalizes itself to such an extent that I think its somewhat superfluous. I do like the idea of a postscript, but maybe something more subtle would work better.
Back to the idea of linearity though - what if you made the piece more intralinked and reflexive? So that the user would have to wade through the text and each reading experience would be a contingency rather than a preset standard? I do love the placement of the links as it is. I’m torn between wanting less linearity and keeping it the way it is. What do you think? Was this a very conscious decision on your part?
All in all, congrats on a great work.
Love,
Sturg
October 6th, 2007 | #
Ps. I’m finally coming back from Maine on Sunday, then moving to Somerville (yay!) after my parents’ auction next weekend. There’s some great concerts coming up. Want to go to Spoon at the Living Room on the 18th?
October 6th, 2007 | #
Also, Art brut is at lupos the 21st, and mum is playing in Somerville Nov. 4! Come one come all.
October 6th, 2007 | #
Hey man
thanks much for the feedback. It is really helpful. I thought hard about making it nonlinear, but decided that I definately want linearity. I took a hypertext class at Brown, and they def. were excited about having a piece that is a whole web, that you read differently every time. I think that could be fine for some pieces, but there’s a way in which it priviliges the medium so far above the actual writing that it makes the writing seem irrelevant. I had the experience of thinking that all HTML pieces were pretty much the same because the writing just approached gibberish. And there were lots of pieces in which you’d read through it, get to the last screen, and you hadn’t even read half of the writing. It struck me that the authors of those pieces were telling me that their writing just wasn’t worth reading. There were times when I was tempted to just put in a loop–so you’d get to one screen near the end and there would be two links, and if you clicked the wrong one you’d be back at an earlier screen, but then you’d have to click through all the ones inbetween it, thus having to read the same screen again. I couldn’t decide if that would piss people off, or if it would make the writing sink in deeper.
Unfortionatly, I updated the online piece but was too lazy to update the zip file. Did you see the new pictures? I like the desert one, but am worried it might take away from the piece because it’s too overstimulating (it’s a popup on the first page of the Rimbaud page)
Hey, where can I find some good open sources web editing programs? I actually used dreamweaver at the library to make this, but that sucks to have to go to the library to work on it. And what’s the program you used to make pinkos? The real reason I ask is that I want to make a personal webpage/blog–not to compete with Pinkos, but just for raw self promotion as I fling myself at the feet of a heartless economy.
Yes come visit come to concerts! i want to see Art Brut: I don’t know Spoon but would be down to check them out.
RjD2 is coming with Mr. Lif to Brown this fall, like in a few weeks, the Brown concert agency is putting it on. You come down for that?
I like the new background and color.
I gotta write some fuckin thees.
October 6th, 2007 | #
Yeah, I totally agree with you about the kind of preciousness of creating a non-linear piece, and how it takes away from the actual content. You’re right - more often than not, it becomes gibberish and it leaves the reader uninvolved. Although gibberish can be kind of interesting sometimes for the wrong reasons, when it takes the form of postmodernist poetry, I think it often has this arrogance of incomprehensibility. I do think that your piece works because it is linear, yet you incorporate those pauses and small deviations of the popups and rollovers - the rollovers especially have this interesting dirty carnival quality to them, almost like a funhouse. There’s a flow and ebb of the progression that’s really nice. I also like the changes in text size. It’s a really simple thing, but it was powerful to me. Basically I like how your essay isn’t really about design, but it still incorporates those formal elements to a raw effect. That’s probably what you called amateurish, which would actually be a compliment here, in my opinion - its not design for design’s sake (and that ars gratia artis mentality is what professionals use to justify getting paid lots of money, since the biggest paid jobs are the most pointless).
alright, well i have more thoughts somewhere tucked behind a fold of grey matter, but i should really be getting something done at work for the moment
October 6th, 2007 | #
Edited/updated.
remember to allow popups if you read it.
October 16th, 2007 | #