#computerchat

[myfriendpokey]

my friend computer

a videogame is an excuse to use the computer. to use a computer is to gain additional sense organs, which also causes the ones you already have to work in a different way. a mouse pointer becomes an extension of your hand, and the eyes adjust to follow it - the cursor does some of the work in making the screen intelligible that the eyes were previously doing, leading to a shift in procedures of visual knowledge. this isn't unique to computers - there's the famous saying that if you have a hammer you start to look at things as if they were nails. a stick may not be terrifically different as an extension of an arm, and a mouse or lightpen may not be terrifically different as an extension of the finger, but slight diversions and losses or redirections of sensitivity modify the ways we use them,  which in turn affects the picture of the world they send back. there's a kind of low-level appeal to expanding your perceptions in this way and it's fun to consider what else could count as a sense organ as well (plasticine, a swimming pool, a hamburger, a chair an advertising billboard). neal stephenson once compared the experience of using an operating system to aimlessly, pleasurably driving a car around: "For a short time he was  extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted." the point is not so much that the car or the computer offered an extension of the  will as an expansion of the field in which the  will operates: maybe you didn't particularly want to drive someplace before you had a car, but now that you do you might as well.

i've written before that i started making computer games as something to do while i waited for my limewire downloads to finish. but to be more exact: i partially downloaded things through limewire because it was an excuse to just tinker on a computer. it helped that it was a very computer-y form of tinkering: you typed, played with inscrutable connections, searched, compared, and if you were lucky - bop! you got a song. so it was an activity with a satisfying beginning, middle and end, and a mild sense of accomplishment. and maybe more importantly it was also an experience that could hypothetically be extended and repeated forever. you could compare to children's toys, which give you a shape with certain affordances that assist with private imaginative rituals but also makes those rituals take on a kind of definite, repeatable quality. and it's interesting to contrast that with my first impressions of using a computer, which were mainly that it have you a wide and enticing new toolset but nothing to DO.

here are some early memories of using computers.

- primary school: weekly computer module where we learned microsoft word, a program which would let you do something you already knew how to do (write sh*t), with no apparent reduction in labour (at least to a kid with bad handwriting and no experience of using a keyboard). the only truly new, non-superfluous use for it that i could see was in the "wordart" function, where you could write your name and then cause it to appear in giant metallic letters or something. this quickly palled.

- summer school: as a special treat one day they let us into the computer lab so that we could browse the internet. i think this was my first exposure to "online". you could search for whatever you wanted but i didn't KNOW what I wanted so i just typed in things like "nintendo" and spent the hour solemnly studying the same handful of official screenshots for banjo-kazooie that i'd already seen in game magazines.

- crimson skies: i played crimson skies for pc and beat the first level. the mission completion screen contains various visual trinkets that you can unlock as you do things. there was a big gold doubloon and i clicked on it to see a slightly larger version of the big gold doubloon. the only thing you could apparently do with it was click the button called "print", so i clicked it, and then asked my parents to set up the printer for me. once it was all done i had the same picture of a gold doubloon, but now it was printed on a sheet of paper. i was unsure of what to do with this, or what the process was intended to accomplish.

no point to any of this other than to record that, for me at least, the purpose of a computer was less visible than the series of affordances it offered, and the process of slowly assembling those affordances into semi-coherent directed processes - into "using" the computer - was a sort of piecemeal and provisional one, driven maybe less by any specific desire to do a thing than by just slowly building up a picture of what processes led into each other, which formed satisfying loops, could be closed and repeated. (the question of why this should be desirable or necessary is interesting and maybe linked to the old, similar questions about the movement of sexuality from a general sensory "polymorphous perversity"  into codified acts and rituals with specific effects).

it's interesting to try and track the paths this same process took as computers became a wider part of everyday life in general, particularly among non-nerd types. the developers  of the "after dark" screensaver compilation (the one with the flying toasters and such) still sound surprised by their  success, by the enormous popularity of what they assumed would  be a niche functional product. but screensavers and desktop backgrounds were also some of the first things i could feel satisfied playing around with on a computer - there were a lot to sort through, they were easy to swap in and out with each other, they had an immediate visual effect that could change the screen vibe in interestingly unforeseen ways. and as one of the easier to use, less process-intensive and more visual pieces of software available for the increasingly more accessible home computer, did they catch on just because they gave all those new users something to do?

of course, videogames also give you a very modular, visual, structured, self-contained thing to do. maybe too much so, in that the history of the form is also that of trying to find ways to evade or complicate structure, to avoid the sort of fatuous closure of the win/loss condition - basically to engage with the distracted movements of human attention in ever more subtle and responsive ways, although not always responsive in the technical sense (theme and meaning that could "respond" to being thought about by changing the ways in which the other elements are perceived, etc).  which is fine, but i also think it could be interesting to pick up more deliberately modest ideas of what these things are and what they're doing. maybe as less a form than an echo of the need for form – a sort of primitive early attempt at constructing new use-patterns on computer that’s still present as model and habit, even if they’re clunky enough to necessitate a certain irony in their re-use. less a medium with consistent,coherent standalone internal properties than the ongoing process of trying to partition off a space for mediumicitywithin more general technology movements. something to be filed alongside screensavers and petz and pokemon dressup toys and websites with pictures of people’s families created for no apparent reason other than a vague idea that you could make a website, and upload pictures of your family to it, and have it look a certain way. not trying to get back to the prelapsarian fragment swamp of computer first contact, not resigned to a hammered-out enclave of acceptable use-practice, more using the conventions as these lightweight disposable tent structures that wrap around the process of the one as it turns into the other. sites under construction.

(images: Lemmings 3D; Shadow Hearts; Boppin’; Microbots)

[reallibertymedia]

Dropping a Coil Podcast w Larry Woods Flash Robwerks - 2020-05-28 - State Of The Art Energy - Pt. 12

[prettyinpinkthemusical]

In de film PIP zit een scene waarin Andie via computerchat met Blaine praat. Ik had het idee om een oud computerscherm te gebruiken voor de aankondiging van de musical via Instagram. Ik heb in Illustrator het scherm gemaakt en ga in Premiere de tekst met een typewriter effect toevoegen.