Aesthetics: The Online and the Real
The digital camera, the microphone, the scanner, anime
...against...
The mp3 player, the loudspeaker, Akihabara, the printer
...moderated by...
The TV screen, the PC's keyboard and mouse, the monitor
I subscribe to the design aesthetic advocated by Artemy Lebedev in article 61: How to get instantly creative: a concise guide. In design, in consumption and in releasing, I propell things from the real into the online -- digitisation. Yet, at the same time, my observations of culture have led me to see that information and ideas from the online do get filtered out into the real. This post will therefore examine the border between the online and the real, whilst acknowledging that they are both parts of each other, although the online seems to rely on the real quite a bit more than the real on the online.
The web designer's job is not to endlessly recreate things from information already on the Internet. It is boring, mind-killing, and copyright is a bitch to deal with. So if you are looking for a picture, make it yourself. Looking for a texture? Find the equivalent in real life and scan it in or take a photo of it. Looking for a sound? Go make it and record it.
Similarly, people take CDs or DVDs in real life and rip them and distribute them online. They scan artbooks and pictures for distribution online.
Anime takes things from real life, drastically transforms it, then broadcasts it. Raw capturers take this digital signal and broadcasts it to the rest of the net. Where exactly the boundary between the Real and the Online is, is anyone's guess.
Yet the loudspeaker allows sounds you have found digitally to be broadcasted into the world. Akihabara is where the online (or unreal) becomes the real. Where maids take on human form, where characters become moving and talking (or at least become 3-dimensional in the form of figures). Cosplay is another area where the Online invades the Real.
Both processes -- bringing elements of the Real into the Online, and taking stuff from the Online and putting it into the Real -- are moderated by the artifacts which pretty much act as gates. They are both part of the real, and part of the Online. The TV screen is in real life, but through it, the Online can be access. Similarly, the computer screen. The mouse and keyboard is in real life, but through their manipulation in real life, Online interactions can occur.
Of course, there are some people who do specialise in taking the online and bringing it into the real. But the most dominant mode for me (and I suspect, a lot of people) is the transfer of the Real into the Online through digitisation, converting real elements into bits and bytes understood by the Online. It is precisely through such a human-driven interaction between the Online and the Real that we can counter the tendency of the Internet to fall into entropy and become a stagnant pool of recycled ideas.
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