Category Archives: Quotes

“In the multimodal landscape of communication, choice and therefore design become central issues. If I have a number of ways of expressing and shaping my message, then the questions that confront me are: which mode is best, most apt, for the content / meaning I wish to communicate? Which mode most appeals to the audience whom I intend to address? Which mode most corresponds to my own interest at this point in shaping the message for communication? Which medium is preferred by my audience? Or by me? How am I positioning myself if I choose this medium or this mode rather than those others?”

– IIID Gunther Kress: Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media Continue reading →

“When all likes lead to Facebook, and liking requires a Facebook account, and Facebook gets to hoard all of the metadata and likes around the interactions between people and content, it depletes the ecosystem of potential and chaos — those attributes which make the technology industry so interesting and competitive. It’s one thing for semantic and identity layers to emerge on the web, but it’s something else entirely for the all of the interactions on those layers to be piped through a single provider (and not just because that provider becomes a single point of failure).”

– FactoryCity » Understanding the Open Graph Protocol Continue reading →

“Stickiness as a business practice was a byproduct of the document era of the web; on the people-centric web, portability is critical.”

– FactoryCity » The Web at a New Crossroads Continue reading →

“It is fine for socially engaged and activist work to operate within the domain of art discourse, providing it also contributes something to that discourse (which actually does have an art historical lineage – think of Situationism, Joseph Beuys, Group Material…). It is comparable to a practice-led PhD: the practical work and the theoretical text both have to be PhD standard, equally important contributions to the field. But if the claims for transdisciplinarity are to be taken seriously, then these projects should also function within other discourses too. The situation I would want to avoid is of inconsequential practices that make no impact on either field.”

– Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop Continue reading →

“I think of design as a kind of creative authoring practice — a way of describing and materializing ideas that are still looking for the right place to live. A designed object can connect an idea to its expression as … Continue reading →

“

For the sake of argument, I will accept Ebert’s roughly stated thesis that art requires authorship. In fact, I actually agree with him. I think he just does not understand where authorship lies in games.

Here is how it works:

• I am able to express my ideas, thoughts and feelings through the design of interactive systems
• Because a game is a complete formal system, the entire possible range of outputs from those systems is determined by me
• People interact with those designed systems and receive the outputs I have determined
• People literate in the medium can reconstruct my ideas, thoughts and feelings by experiencing these outputs
• Therefore, by definition, there is an unbreakable chain between my ideas, thoughts and feelings and the player’s experience – I author mechanics that yield deterministic outputs in the game dynamics that lead the player to experience the aesthetic I want them to experience (within a given tolerance)

”

– On Authorship in Games – Click Nothing Continue reading →

“I have to believe that the solitary nature of most computer games is a temporary aberration, a consequence of the technology, and that as networks spread and their bandwidth increases, the historical norm will reassert itself.”

– I Have No Words & I Must Design Continue reading →

Following your curiosity rather than a career path/ladder/trajectory seems incredibly wise. Continue reading →

“In the early/mid Nineties the “Luther Blissett” collective identity was created and adopted by an informal network of people (artists, hackers, and activists) interested in using the power of myths, and moving beyond agit-prop “counter-information”. In Bologna, my circle of friends shared an obsession with the eternal return of such archetypal figures as folk heroes and tricksters. We spent our days exploring pop culture, studying the language of the Mexican Zapatistas, collecting stories of media hoaxes and communication guerrilla warfare since the 1920’s (Berlin Dada stuff, futuristic soirées etc.), obsessively re-watching one particular movie, Slapshot by George Roy Hill, starring Paul Newman as hockey player Reggie Dunlop. We liked Reggie Dunlop very much, he was the perfect trickster, the Anansi of African legends, the Coyote of Native American legends, Ulysses manipulating the cyclop’s mind.”

– Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution (Part One): An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation Continue reading →

“Assumption 1. Participatory activity is like all art: it is presentational. It is not. There is no product put out into the world, like a play, video tape, piece of music, etc. Assumption 2. Participatory activity has an audience to … Continue reading →