Response 3 – JamesA

There are certain aspects of a technological art piece – a web page, a game, etc – that can’t be achieved in any other medium. Interactivity can portray previously limited aspects of ourselves. Take, for instance, the project Nobody Here. It’s a disjointed collection of pages that connect to one another randomly. Each page portrays a thought the author has had, or an aspect of the author’s life, or their personality. For instance, right now I’m looking at a page with a black hand. The hand is large, but out of focus. It shakes restlessly back and forth. The text:

“I’m not religious, but at the

end of my life I wouldn’t mind

hearing a deep, resounding

voice telling me what it was I

should have done.

I wonder what he’d say.”

This picture, and this text, explore the idea of religious comfort. The idea of an all-knowing God putting some black-and-whiteness into your ambiguous life, especially at the vulnerable time of death, is one that humans have held for a long time. This page points out some of the silliness. What would a God even look like? We can’t see them, so their image is blurred in our minds. Are they just a big version of us? Doesn’t that seem somewhat unimaginative? There are tons of things to think about here. There’s a lot of unpacking and analysis to be done. However, the page isn’t conducive to unpacking. Immediately, you are tempted to click the word “done” and move to a new thought, a new art piece. I think this is representative of the fast-paced world we live in, and how our brains are affected by that. A disjointed brain, a random collection of thoughts, is a lot more similar to how our brains actually work than any linear collection of words. Our minds are not linear. They jump from point to point, thought to thought, without sense or organization. I’d say a web page is a very accurate representation of this fact. You aren’t bound by order: you’re free to jump from page to page, exploring the factors that connect them.

Sometimes these projects come to be not as technological aspects trying to explain human nature, but as a human nature reaction to technology. Take, for instance, Shooting Back. It’s a simple concept: people take cameras into places with security cameras and film the security cameras. This demonstrates how widespread these cameras are, and how paranoid the owners of these cameras can be. A similar project, one that’s very close to my heart, is Surveillance Camera Man. A modern day superhero, SCM takes a camera onto the street and simply films people without their permission. He isn’t discreet about it, he walks up right in front of people and starts filming them. Because he does this in public, the people he films have no recourse. However, they often get incredibly upset, even though SCM isn’t technically breaking any laws. This type of project wouldn’t be possible without technology, and points out our often unreasonable reactions to it. When someone gets upset at being filmed, SCM will often say something along the lines of “but you just left a store. There are cameras in there.” Why are we less intimidated by automated cameras, even knowing there might be someone on the other end, silently watching us? A question like this would be much more difficult to pose without an open-ended, interactive project to show just how true it is.