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Soundtrack: In the woods, by Jambinai.
A bit of post-rock fused with Korean folk.
A few months ago, intrigued by how media-savvy Byung-Chul Han is, I succumbed to reading his book titled Non-Things.
Not knowing much about the philosopher and even less about the book, I was driven by two reasons:
1 – The title: Non-Things.
I've been thinking for a long time that we increasingly possess fewer "things" and much of what we believe to be ours isn't. You don't possess/own the photo of your cat that appears on your phone. It would disappear if the server farm where it's stored burned down. The only thing that's truly yours is intellectual property.
I'll never forget a work exhibited at MACUF in which the artist (unfortunately I don't remember the name) crossed half of Europe following the same route as his Facebook data until reaching the server farm where it was stored.
The cloud fallacy.
I was curious to know if the book, with that title, addressed the topic somehow.
Although it doesn't, I have found very interesting parts regarding it.
For example, in the chapter "From Possession to Experiences" which talks about the concept of possession according to German philosopher Walter Benjamin (quote within a quote):
The true collector is the opposite of the consumer. He is an interpreter of destiny, a physiognomist of the world of things: "As soon as he has them in his hands, they seem to incite him to contemplate them in their distance."
Maybe NFTs are successful because they reinforce the idea of possessing an artifact that exists to be contemplated.
On the other hand, according to Byung-Chul Han, not establishing a stable relationship with an object prevents us from possessing it. Not having life experiences with it prevents it from being ours.
Like the posts that flow in the Instagram or TikTok stream versus an analog photograph from years ago that's hard to let go of.
2 – Getting to know the style of a Korean philosopher who has managed to reach a mass audience in a world that lives obsessed with immediacy and the now.
The style is simple, short sentences and a description of current reality (in my opinion) without great pretensions.
Undoubtedly, much more accessible than Baudrillard or Eco.
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On the other hand, I'd like to share some phrases from the book that spoke to me, which I accompany with brief thoughts:
Art becomes loaded with information and discourse. It wants to instruct instead of seduce.
I believe that in contemporary art there's a tendency for artists to abandon the seductive and prioritize the analytical and the vindication of their ideological lines. Beauty is disadvantaged against the utility of the work as an object of communication. To give an example, the Sistine Chapel (to cite a monumental work) is an exercise in information and discourse but also in beauty and sensory enjoyment.
The utilitas versus the deleitas that is so worked on at Instituto Tramontana.
Let's look for the sweet spot in the things we design.
Heidegger emphatically sides with work and the hand, as if he had intuited that future human beings will not have hands and, instead of working, will be inclined to play.
We have already been portrayed in multiple science-fiction films as extreme homo ludens: from Tron to Ready Player One through Wall-e.
We will increasingly have to design with more ludic components to capture users.
The perception of the temporally long and slow only recognizes still things. Everything that hurries is condemned to disappear.
Attributable to the importance that things have a couple of days after being published on the network in the era of "now".
Silence is an intense form of attention.
In human relationships we would say yes (at least I want to think that's how it is) but, could we apply this phrase to the relationship between user and interface?
Does a minimalist and silent interface convey more respect and make the user feel more like the protagonist?
Things make time tangible, while rituals make it transitable.
Diving into the Instagram or Twitter stream has become a ritual. We spend time swiping with consciousness at the same level as when we put toothpaste on the toothbrush.
Emptiness and silence are brothers. Silence also doesn't mean that no sound is heard. Some sounds can even accentuate it.
He wanders on this idea for several paragraphs and, in a strange but perhaps logical relationship, it brings to mind the concept of ma present in Japanese culture, from Wikipedia:
"Though commonly used to refer to literal, visible negative space, ma may also refer to the perception of a space, gap or interval, without necessarily requiring a physical compositional element."
But what really makes me think is not about games of tension, relaxation and distance between elements, but that one feels more loneliness before a blank sheet with a small dot than before a completely empty one.
Although that small dot is also a promise that in that space many things can happen.
Soundtrack: In the woods, by Jambinai.
A bit of post-rock fused with Korean folk.