Absolutely. Running around with a large format camera (Graflex) with an Instax back (lomograflok) and making photos and immediately giving results back to people changed a lot. Strangers were basically lining up to ask about the camera and have their photo taken. That was a really fun experience, and I noticed how much I missed that excitement - before camera phones took over such moments were much more common.
Now I build/3d print my own large and medium format cameras, and that also makes it much more interesting, but the fun of instant photography with an ancient looking camera is just incredible.
Like a polaroid shot with an actually good lens. Also the whole performative part of making a photograph is of course much richer with an old, manual camera.
Absolutely, I feel like there is a lack of expressivity on the web – sure, I can upvote, comment, block/report or go away, but that's basically it. I can't frown, toss thing off the table, spit, grunt, roll eyes, look away, listen intently, nervously touch my face or fidget with my keys. At least not in any socially significant way. And as we spend so much time online, our expressiveness also kind of gets filtered down to the tools that are available. Not bodily expression but a few very limited gestures. So maybe we can imagine and create new gestures?
My other project was about a similar question - what if our emotional life gets reduced to the emojis provided to us by facebook? This was from 2018 so AI images were very new then :)
https://rybakov.com/blog/zuckerberg_emojis/
And another, more productive approach was to look at gestures available in the physical library of Sitterwerk St.Gallen and translate it to the digital world. This was before tab groups landed in the main browsers (and tbh. the implementation is still not great):
https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
Yes, I remember a cute cat living on my desktop, chasing my cursor.
Somebody on mastodon also linked to https://kickassapp.com/ - an asteroid game where you destroy DOM elements on websites, a project from 2011.
A few times in my career I've been looking for exactly this role, a place that would value sense and design/ux sensibility as well as an understanding of what is technically possible. Larger companies don't hire for this role, because it does not have a name. You could write “Temple Grandin for the web”, but that is closer to magic, something non-scalable, a position that is created for a specific person. I ended up working in small teams, often in experimental research positions, but that too is very special and esoteric.
If the role had a name, not even a theoretical foundation but simply a name, then and only then it could actually exist.
Right, and there are better burgers than McDonalds. My point here is just to bring up an example of instincts getting horribly miscalibrated in a way that highlights the need for thoughtfulness and self-control.
Make no mistake, the term self-control doesn't just apply to food instincts, it applies to people instincts too. Your instincts want you to go around assuming that ugly people are bad and pretty people are good, but if you avoid every uggo you're gonna miss out (especially in tech) and if you trust every handsome salesman you meet you're gonna get rolled. Thoughtfulness and self-control are always warranted.
You can calibrate your gut feeling, though. You do it, every day, as you go through life. You get a gut feeling that a specific person might be difficult, and you can override it consciously.
But I often find that the “gut” feeling is more often right, and the unexplainability of it comes from the fact that it takes hundreds of little things into account and models future interaction outcomes and presents the feeling you will have in the end as ”gut feeling”.
Your own black box of neural networks in your gut.
After having worked with Latour (for two years, on his last exhibition and my artistic research), I got the feeling that he is much more a speaking philosopher, rather than a writing one. I found his speeches easier to grok and, once I started treating his books as speeches, they too became easier to understand.
Still, I remember proposing something more artistic for the exhibition, and he countered by saying that it would make things less clear, harder to understand. He was genuinely looking for ways to express ideas in ways that would make them easier to grasp. It's just that, for some things, the more direct way towards understanding might actually be the winded, poetic way.
