Making digital things seem physical is one way of
getting
farther from (and in some positive sense closer to!) the metal
.
There's something nice about
physical things, something comforting to our
physically-evolved human souls. Just because you can
do so much more on the internet doesn't mean you need to :)
Near the end of this class I realized that a lot of my projects
share this common theme. Nucleica is a digital amalgation
of two physical things - a trailhead and a synthesizer. Similarly,
LockerNotes is a way to digitalize leaving notes for people to find,
and Heehee Box is framed as an iPod, evoking the 2000s as well as
field-recording devices used in Linguistics and Anthropology. I think
maybe the ‘closer to the metal’ article we read had a bigger impact on me
than I thought at the time - it’s been on my mind a lot since. Although
to be honest, I think I’ve liked this kind of thing for years - one of my favorite
internet artists, Spencer Chang, often
makes digital things physical, and physical things digital.