Hypertext as the death of arcana, or how the click killed curiosity. The depth of the internet is, of course, limitless, a bottomless pit of html that can take us off and away on any number of unexpected byways and diversions. Yet is this expectation of diversion flattening out our experience of the physical world? The days of an internet where every stumble was a moment of true discovery are gone forever, perhaps, as curatorial zeal fast overtakes quiet collectomania as the principle online activity.

This post at Tomorrow Museum sums it up, Facebook is worse than AOL: 'Back in the day, AOL had a lot of secret gardens. According to my friend Erin, there was a Spin magazine message board frequented by established rock critics that at an off the index location. A lot of corporations and publications created "channels" which would include chat rooms and message boards. These were about as successful as the businesses with Second Life presences. But some users would take over the dead space and make it their own. Several online friends and I once claimed the message boards for a Canadian radio station long after it was launched and quickly abandoned. Likely the citizens of Second Life do that with virtual ghost town storefronts.'

Remember when GeoCities died? It's a stretched metaphor, but many of those pages will turn into ancient overgrown walls marking strange patterns in the middle of a dense jungle, their purpose almost impossible to decipher. Internet archaeology is just another strand of curatorialism, fed by Archive.org and the perverse attraction of digital kitsch, a medium that gains in curiosity and cute value far quicker than its real-world equivalent. Technological kitsch moves quickly, and digital kitsch even quicker still; the multimedia experiences of the last decade are quaint and laughable, just as we will soon be perversely thrilled by the clunkiness of 2010's attempts at augmented reality.

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Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov / art by Paul Tebbott / Lady Gaga, the Illuminati Puppet / more conspiracy; was The London Weekly, a new freesheet in the capital, deliberately intended to be utterly awful? / state of the German magazine scene / Let's Celebrate with Cake / Art 313, odds and ends / what was the first ever hypertext document? The Aspen Movie Map, a sort of proto Google Streetview.

Spacemen: Friends and Foes, post-war paranoia manifested as science fiction presented as fact. Via Ask me-fi. Related, the Samsung Aircruise, a 'clipper in the clouds'. Steampunk meets the contemporary aesthetic / tni SYLLABUS, 'TNI readers curate the internet,' from The New Inquiry / mellabrown, a tumblr / Not until 2027, a tumblr / updownacross, a weblog / turrbull, a weblog / the ARCH+ photostream.

The Spatial Agency Database, architecture, design, theory and movements in biographical form / Up Close and Private, a web publication / After You Left, They Took It Apart: Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes, Photographs by Chris Mottalini / vans in the landscape, at Vans and the places where they were / OPEN Dalston, investigating planning issues in a London borough / Lightning Bolt, an interview.

Roger Ebert writing about Jermyn Street / Mayonaka, a tumblr / a touchscreen electric guitar from Misa / Sliding Lego house / buy a Russian Truck / Printeresting Notebook, a weblog / searching for rare vinyl in West Africa, especially these pictures: I, II. At Voodoo Funk.

Labels: things, thoughts

posted by things at 21:46 / 1 comments