Massaged by the Medium.
Inventories of Affect.
Is a book project by artists across UTC +7 through +12 working to make felt the embodied effects of our (chronic) digital condition. It asks, What is what we’re doing, doing back to us?
Click here to download PDF public release beta (11mb)
The site of all digital experience is the interface, the realty [sic] where digital technology and human biology are inter-actors upon one another. As we wield the interface upon digital assets, so does the interface write itself into our movement and into our thinking.
If we shape our environment and then our environment shapes us, let us consider that;
- The screen is breathtaking, the medical term for this is screen apnea.
- Confirmation bias is a currency, googlemaps’ political borders adapt to your IP address1.
- Predictive text is a misnomer for think-assist… thus writing-to-think does itself becomes a tandem act of mundane cyborgism.
#All_interface_work_us_over_completely
A button is a luxury in the default of touchscreens.
A playlist is not a mixtape. An email is not a letter. This PDF is not a book.
Inspired by “The Medium is the Massage” we shift focus from the cultural ramifications of the electronic age to those of our digital age. With modality also informed by “Understanding Comics”, “At Large (with reasonable doubt)” and “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”.
If we are what we repeatedly do then we are input to a global fibre optic network. If we are the sum of our environment then we are peripherals carrying out tasks decided by overlapping algorithms, optimised towards opaque incentives.
This book encourages playful reasoning from first principles to help us make apparent and bear witness to second order effects.
Digital can extend human will, but it is also an alien lifeform, a social phenomena, the material condition of our shared context. We are doing this. And what is that doing back to us?
Lead: M@
Designer: Travis DeVries
Editor: Chloe Chignell
Contributors: