The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Created by Matt Richardson. www.mattrichardson.com
ANP: You talk about how much you love Spambots. I wonder if this love and the attempt to parse what part of them might be human or attempting to truly communicate with humans, I wonder if you’ve found any difficulty in talking to people as a result. JB: I don’t know. If I take it a step back and understand how these digital things are affecting the way we see the world, the one thing spambots don’t do very well is they don’t have any sense of memory or experience. They seem incredibly naïve. Which is charming, right? It’s something nice and makes them seem vulnerable, like a puppy. But that quality of memory and experience is exactly what humans seem to struggle with. ANP: When you put it that way, it seems like humans and spambots aren’t so different. I guess these are universal concerns. JB: I’m incredibly sensitive to the ways in which we attempt to manipulate memory and experience. I see it in the ways in which we try to present our experiences online, the way in which we relate. In my own work it very much came out in trying to understand why our experience with books is different when they become ebooks. I see exactly the same process happening with the way that we deal with digital photographs online—for example, the spread of the retro-filter movement in Instagram—and also in huge numbers of other things. Seems to me to be a way that we’re trying to impose emotions and memories that we understand as almost physical onto very digital things. Then I start to see that in terms of how easily constructed a lot of those memories are. Take the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. There’s a whole effort of collective memory creation going on where we’re trying to implant in the consciousness of the country a memory of what those 60 years have been like. Now, I don’t remember any of those things. I wasn’t there. I haven’t taken part in any of these street parties that they say are one of the cultural signifiers of the nation. But we construct them through
television and advertising in order to recreate them. Now take that and project it forward into the future and it feels to me like that’s what we’re trying to do with a lot of our online activity. Because we have this whole network sphere in which we spend a vast amount of our time and yet we have no memory or experience in it. And we still have to work out how we have lasting memories and experiences, and for me it’s all we have, it’s what makes us. How do we construct those in the digital world? What do they look like? What does a digital souvenir look like? Can you imagine a digital souvenir that has no substantiation? I’m increasingly sensitive to it. ANP: That’s really interesting, and you’re making me think two things here. First, does the digital experience enhance authenticity? Or does it falsify it if we can’t touch it? JB: I don’t know what authenticity means. I say that with incredible seriousness. Our ideas of authenticity have always been rooted in physical objects. But that’s been a myth; I see it all the time, again with books. This idea that because something is physically instantiated is therefore authentic, that’s simply not true, there have always been fakes and heresies and ways of confusing this issue. The network reveals that those things stand on very shaky foundations. We’re increasingly aware of that, though I’m loath to admit it or deal with it in any kind of real way. ANP: The other thing that this talk about our digital experience and memory is making me think about is how it’s forcing a nostalgia for things we weren’t old enough to actually experience. And it’s the same thing you were talking about, which you formed or identified the New Aesthetic as a response to. That idea that things were better in the old days, and a lot of these kids aren’t even old enough to have experienced the aesthetic they’re perpetuating. JB: That’s always been the case. I grew up listening to music made long before I was born and loving it and thinking it was the best thing. The network has made it obvious
Sebastian Schmieg & Sylvio Lorusso’s “56 Broken Kindle Screens” is a print on demand paperback that consists of found photos depicting broken Kindle screens. The Kindle is Amazon’s e-reading device which is by default connected to the company’s book store.The book takes as its starting point the peculiar aesthetic of broken E Ink displays and serves as an examination into the reading device’s materiality. As the screens break, they become collages composed of different pages, cover illustrations and interface elements. www.sebastianschmieg.com
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