Journals

1

The Schwulst reading made me really excited about beginning to learn how to make a website. I liked the website as thrown rock that’s now falling deep into the ocean because I feel like there are a lot of things I like to make for a brief period and then completely let it go. It is a small example, but in middle school when Instagram first started becoming a thing for my friends and me, we would make endless accounts each with a specific purpose. One account that I recently stumbled back on was a promotional page for a production release that was never going to happen. Another thing that comes to mind are the countless one-off zines I have made that ended up lost or destroyed. These are things that I felt should be made at one point but never meant to fully invest in. Websites are another medium that can serve these quick bursts. With this article and the A Rant About “Technology” article, the ability to create a website opens a lot of doors. I really like how Le Guin wrote that technologies are what we can learn to do.

2

One thing that resonated with me was the point about how websites continue to exist in the medium they were created in. Many artifacts of the past and present are stored in places that might attempt to maintain a certain level of consistency with where the artifacts came from but there is always a kind of filtering that occurs. For example, when you watch an old movie on your laptop. The movie was shot on celluloid film but over the years it has been processed into a more accessible medium that is different from the original. This process is inevitable for many mediums, but websites have a certain ability to maintain their medium with ease. You could print out the contents of a website but people would only do this for very specific reasons that would not come up regularly.

3

I think it was interesting how in the beginning of the essay, we are led in with the simple premise that we will be reading about Choi’s experience building a computer. Towards the end of the piece we are reading about how cities are like computers for humans the larger significance of that connection. I like how when that connection is being made it feels like that connection must be made when beginning to do something like build a computer. I often think of looking at an ant hill as a kid and being told, “This is no different from our cities.”

4

I had a really nice time reading this essay. At first I didn’t completely understand the structure because the wayback machine banner was blocking the top so I had to wait for the notification of the next reading to pop up which was interesting. I would refresh the page to try and get it back. Aside from that though, It really helped me slow down in my reading. Only seeing a portion of the text before the next. It was very digestible. I have always had a high and low opinion on texting. Sometimes it feels actually fun and interesting and open to so many possibilities and sometimes it feels like the worst thing in the world and I would do anything to turn a text conversation into a face-to-face conversation. So reading about Copely’s ideas on frustration and anticipation in the person to person online interactions.

5
I’ve been thinking a lot about the inevitability of certain things in art recently and how the desire for things to be the way they were. Specifically there is an interview with Jon Rafman where he talks about wanting to make films and getting into the early 2000s film scene. He said he was looking for his Truffaut and Rivette. He was looking for his French new wave. What he saw though was nothing of the sort (he talked about mumblecore movies). What he said he realized was that it was wrong to look for a world that existed in the past. It is easier to look to the past when faced with a difficult present and say "that is what worked and what we should go back to" than it is to think of something completely new. I think understand what chimera is writing about and agree with most of his critiques but also think the answer is not to try to define a specific role technology should exist in because specific roles and definitions of things as expansive as the internet seem impossible to maintain. While I do think it is important to attempt to define things, it almost feels pointless.
6
The all catalogs (A-Z)2002 piece is interesting because it is prefaced with the idea that we should look at technology as tools and we should interact with these tools in a meaningful way. I think this piece achieves that in defamiliarizing how one would interact with something like mail-order catalogs and that can be applied further. It is acknowledged in the piece that it is time sensitive and it is crazy how quickly something like that can become outdated. 15,194 mail order catalogs.