February 17, 2011
from the comments
Deron, what if I wanted that link all long and protruding and horrific to look at? What if that was an intentional design decision, asking the viewer to confront something in themselves while simultaneously requiring them to process information in a format that isn’t ideal? Link-fixing has plagued the exploratory information performance art movement for far too long, and when my National Endowment for the Arts grant gets cleared you better just watch out. There will be links, ugly links, it’s going to get disgusting with the underscores and the slashes and the periods and all manner of disgusting coding meant to transport us from one fixed position on the web to another fixed position.
You’re just… you’re just undoing eight years of graduate school, in a single simple moment of html coding! I mean, any suggestion that linking the way we EIPAM artists link is promoted by laziness is just dead wrong. Just dead wrong, and offensive to those of us who’ve been throwing up links since we were kids.
No one trained us, Deron. We didn’t go to your fancy private HTML Academies. Things were different, and we had to learn in libraries. We learned on the go, quickly Alt-Tabbing away from prying eyes. We had to be fast, get the information out there, MAKE people engage with us, against their will. That movement necessarily spawned the more, shall we say… reactionary branch of the EIPAM, but those members are frequently in contact and we wish them well though we may not agree with their tactics.
You can’t just… jeez. You are an affront, sir.
You know, some night the other kids and I would be chatting on the ICQ, and you’d hear rumors. Someone talked about “going all city”, that’s where you’d thrown a link up on every major website comment section in a single night. It wasn’t easy, and yeah, the Mayor called for a crackdown. When the Mayor knows your name, you know you’ve got the kind of attention that can break a movement into the public sector. This wasn’t just a bunch of Internet freaks causing mayhem and de-nice-ifying the Internet anymore. This shit got real, and it got real real fast. Going all city. Man, that’s how I lost three of my best friends. Got distracted, didn’t hear their mom’s come in behind them. Once an authority figure got a glimpse of what you were doing, you know, in the early days… you were done. I still got friends, I still hear about people tryna go all city. It just isn’t done, not anymore. It’s not the same.
Captcha? Please, c’mon, I mean, that’s not even… whatever, captcha.
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I laughed out loud reading this, this morning.
Amanda Mae.
pretty much the best thing ever.
Amanda Mae is a bright shining star.