Summary / Spring 2010
Thesis: Contranatura, a collection of critical design projects that celebrate irrational behavior in the logical confines of the Internet.
Abstract:
The Internet has rapidly consumed most of our other intellectual technologies; it is now our map, clock, printing press, typewriter, calculator, telephone, radio, and TV. Given McLuhan’s assertion that “The medium is the message,” the Internet holds unprecedented influence over our thoughts. However, the architecture of the Internet continues to be designed around Norman’s machine-centric view of technology. The emerging ‘Synaptic Web’ encourages real-time activity streams and a plethora of connections with little concern for its cognitive effects. Americans each consume 34 gigabytes of information every day, and the information overload is eroding our attention spans. We are becoming massive consumers who produce machine-readable meta-data about our lives. The requirements of the machine – precision, order, and logic – are in turn machining us. Our capacity for vague, illogical, and emotional expression are what separate us from the machine, yet these qualities do not exist in the structure of our most pervasive communication system.
Contronatura is a collection of critical Internet art projects that introduce qualitative outcomes to our quantitative Internet lives. Each project is a commentary on an existing interaction, identifying an opportunity to create a human-centric experience. Instead of rejecting the qualities that separate us from the machine, Contranatura embraces them. Superstition and the psychology of irrational behavior are used as conceptual foundations for creating vague, emotional, and illogical structures in the rational architecture of the Internet. Through the subversion of our machine-centric interactions, Contranatura can be seen as an online celebration of humanity in the face of the machine.
Keywords: Critical Design, Internet Art, Superstition, Psychology
Thesis Instructors: Cynthia Lawson (studio) and Ethan Silverman (writing)
Domains: Cultural Superstitions, Internet as Playground & Factory, Media Theory, Synaptic Web
