what I read during the weekend:
quotes from Jessica Helfands SIX (+2) ESSAYS ON DESIGN AND NEW MEDIA published in NY 1997
Image programmes, like Adobe Photoshop, offer a plenthora of choices - brushes and filters, pens and pencils, masks and erasers - look at all those tools, all those are toys! Think about it: if you were standing in front of the Mona Lisa and someone handed you a can of spray paint, inviting you to go wild, telling you that anything you did, any alteration or defacement could instantly be erased - wouldn't you be just the least bit tempted?
p9
On screen, we aquire augmented powers: we can dupe and disort, flip and flop, colorize and compress and recreate an image at will. But do we? Should we? Who decides, and how? And when?
p9/10
The reality is that non of us really know just how far it's going to take us [computer development]. Most of us agree that the computer won't think for us, but we continue to wonder: can it engage us - creatively, conceptually - to the degree that it modifies our thinking?
p10
We fire and miss, revert to saved and fire again. The screen becomes an endlessly forgiving sketching suface - gone is the anxiety of 'ruining' the blank first page of a brand-new sketchbook.
p 15 Adolf Loos quotation:
One cannot speak a capital letter.
p16
"Spoken words", wrote Aristotle in LOGIC, "are the symbols of mental experience. Written words are the symbols of spoken words." Today, centuries later, the equation has added a new link: what happens when written words can speak? When they can move? When they can be imbued with sound and tone and nuance and decibel and harmony and voice?
p17
Of what value are typographic choices - bold and italic, for example - when words can dance across the screen, dissolve or disappear altogether?
In the land of e-mail, we all "sound" alike: everyone writes in system fonts.
p18
E-mail is functionally serviceable and visuably forgettable, not unlike fast food. It's drive-through design: get in, get out, move on.
p47
With its electronic language of e-mail and emoticons, its emphasis on bevity and abreviation, the internet is the large-scale fulfillment of the culture of interruption that began with grazing at dinner parties and found it's aesthetic home in the rapid-cut, short attentionspan editing style on MTV.
p 49
In this new world [the internet], the social patterns and bevavioral ramifications of how- and why- users access this material will demand that we conceptualize time and space with more abitious thinking, more intentive models and, undoubtely, more inspired design than presently exist.
So how will theoretical and practical functions of design reinvent - and sustain - themselves in this new idiom?
p64/65
In his excellent book, war of the worlds, cultural critic Mark Slouka suggests that what sets the real world apart from cyberspace is its reliance upon context: without context, he argues, ethical behavior is impossible.
p 71/72
In electronic media, where the tramsmittal of data depends upon the generally unreliable support of varying bandwidth, Real Time is immediate time, everything at once time, time without interruption or delay. Real Time implies no waiting - but in Real World, don't we occasionally wait for things? We wait in supermarket lines, at the bank, in muvie queues; we wait "on hold" on the telephone, or put the VCR on "pause" to answer the door. Information transmittal, whether on CD-ROM or via netwoked phone lines or in face-to-face conversation, takes time.
