Is it good or bad?
Someone emailed me and told me that I’m a post modernist and Bret Victor is a modernist and that’s the reason I disagree with him on most things in that future of coding episode.
I had no idea what this person meant so I asked for more information and I started looking up things and reading articles and papers and books and watching videos and documentaries and films and I—
I decided that this person was right. I am a post-modernist and Bret Victor is a modernist and that’s why I disagree with him on most things in that future of coding episode. I don’t know if Bret Victor would agree with that categorisation or not and I’ve never met him and I’m sure he’s a lovely guy and either way he’s a modernist.
So I started writing this all up into a very very very very long blog post essay thing and it had all sorts of references and definitions and arguments and historical context blah blah blah. Basically it was my explanation for why I hate modernist mindsets.
And I went deeper and deeper, reading more and more texts and finding more perspectives and alternative takes on the post modernist modernist split and it was very enlightening to me to—
These movements are sometimes called meta narratives. And they end up explaining everything about our society. Everything we have is built up on modernism— Modernism won. And here as I write this I find myself drawn more and more into—
This sort of took over my life for three weeks, so I stopped writing the blog post, for my own health.
I am currently making a video for my youtube channel where I make sand in 99 different ways. That’s the premise at least. There will be some twists along the way but I can assure you that I am making many many sands.
And I am following a rule that every sand needs to be completely unique (no cop outs) and it’s going to be a twenty minute video and I’ve been writing “SAND” on my hand for months to try to remind myself of the video so that I can come up with more ideas for sand.
In my head, I can basically split up the last five years of my life by “which video was I making at the time” because the video becomes my life— I become obsessed. It’s probably not a healthy way to live.
It gets in the way of my work, my social life, my everything but I still want to do it— I feel like I have to do it— and I love the “pointlessly high effort” aesthetic, like building an entire engine for 30 seconds of footage.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched the Dead Fish talk. It’s a fantastic talk and it’s very impressive and engaging and thought provoking and one of my favourite talks. And as well as being all of those things, I also disagree with almost everything the speaker says in it. And no one else on the planet seems to agree with me— at least no one I’ve met— except one person.
For me, this talk is everything gatekeepy about computer art. It’s modernism through and through, saying that our problems with creativity can be solved with better technologies.
Sorry reader, better tools won’t save your shitty drawings. Your lifeless art is lifeless because of you, not your choice of iPad program. Your sense of dissatisfaction comes from lack of imagination, not lack of technology. Your fish is dead because you are dead inside— you’ve lost your childlike sense of wonder for the world.
There’s something depressing about Apple’s recent announcements. They claim to introduce the future— their modernist future, where we’ll have a face strapped to our face and we’ll chuck out all our old instruments and we’ll—
This is modernism. “Our old tools are unreliable and imperfect and imprecise and faulty and big and clunky! We can’t rely on them! We must be saved by better technology!”
I don’t remember getting this same depressing feeling from Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone but maybe I was just swept up by the charisma of it all. I guess iPhone did take over the world as predicted. But is that a good thing?
OH NO I AM WRITING A REALLY LONG BLOG POST ABOUT MODERNISM AGAIN
let’s wrap this up
I think modernist messages are appealing because they appeal to optimism. “We can make things better! Things are a bad now but they don’t have to be!”
And post modernism can come across as the bringer of bad news: “Technology won’t solve our problems.”
But that would be missing out the most important part of post modernism: “It is ok to not know. It is ok to be contradictory. It is ok to use imperfect tools.”
And of course: “Your fish can be alive if you want it to be.”
Back to the wikiblogarden.
here is my unused list of references from my previous unpublished blog post: