Surplus elements in design always disrupt the end experience. But it takes much more effort to design objects without surplus elements. It is difficult to be precise. And because of this difficulty, the disparity between our eyes and the way the frame wants to be seen comes up. The disparity is fundamental and is responsible for the reason design practice is in this state of voiceless delusion.
Surplus is a matter of perspective also. Who decides whether a given element needs to be there or not? Nobody.
The fragments of the aesthetic of a frame might be also residing in the surplus. What we think is extra or surplus might actually be the frame’s way of giving out its self-knowledge.
The fact is that we neither know what the surplus is, nor do we know what it represents. The discussion that we might be missing out on is the calibration of what ought to be in the frame and what out of it.
Service is already agreed to be an act of empathy. A channel of co-experience. So I service memory, make history disappear. You can talk to me as if history were washed away. History being an archive of collective experience, not the moss that a spinning lifespan gathers (there is another page for nostalgia somewhere in the museum).
History will have to disappear, because time is not a cemetery. What will we do with so many dead people, so many ghosts? Land will run out, where will the cemeteries go? Time is not a cemetery, there are tangents in your eyes that want to speed off into all possible directions. But they feel bogged down, weighed down. History will descend into fiction, into amnesia, into weightlessness. It is a coincidence, that I can understand what you are saying. I could very well have not.
We will all have to work much harder to produce meaning. We can't lean back on the cobwebs of history, whoever knows anything? There is a buzz in the air, history inspires repression. There are opinions about "corrections," "repairs," setting things in motion in altogether other directions. Ghosts come back, impressions show, corrections can't be made. Instincts will have to run their course.
Serve vice. As there is little else to serve. All virtue is cloaked, parables of grandeur and heroism hide emotions. The truth in virtue remains oblique and diluted. Much like family stories, family histories. So, some filmmakers only make films about gangsters, about violence. They cannot think about the life we live.
Only machines retain the capacity to serve. And machines cannot emote. They only fulfill their purpose of existence, and that maybe is an emotional way of thinking of machines. Like which? Take the server, the computer on the network which allows and transmits the passage of traffic. And serves what information it has. Selflessly till it dies or goes obsolete.
Software makers who do not see grace in operating systems anymore make viruses and trojans. But they play safe, they restrain their agression, their nihilism. What about my kitchen? Why isn't each act of cooking a battle with anti-taste, which my stove, oven and fridge conspire with. Those who are disenchanted with the social just stay away, why don't they make life more difficult for those on the border?
The desire to perform magic comes from a desire to fulfil the audience. Fulfil the audience's desire to transcend, rise up, be delivered out of ordinariness. So, magic is performed. Whether this performed magic is illusion, trickery, deftness of handwork or access to supernatural power we will leave open for now, let's say. It can be either; without disrupting the configuration of this idea.
Lightening moods; being the joker, jester and the racketeer all combined is a magical act. Anything that you do that changes how I feel, and doesn't allow me to be distracted, fragmented and pre-occupied is a magical act. Magic doesn't have a method, magic is mysterious, it is improvised in practise and has a secretive source-code. How I wish that Art was magic. It is not. It is methodical disaster, a toxic recipe for disenchantment. Like any poem that can be fully understood can not be a poem.
Refreshing the memory stack, "cognitive dissonance" producing electricity. He asks us to imagine pure movement of a body, not reading into choreography for meaning. But we have gone ahead and made everything meaningful, sorry. The patch of sun on the wall is a photograph, you are a photograph, I am a photograph. He says, "Shake that feeling off."
Design is a science of enforcing convenience. There is no harm of course, in lightening labour and simplifying systems. No harm. Except to the interests of the mind. Things quickly become boring when they become convenient. In fact, they recede into the background. Become a part of the infrastructure. Take toilets, for instance. Or the internet. Or maybe the ipod.
Industrial design is the only knowledge-system which holds an ambition to bore everyone as quickly as possible. If it is easy to use, it doesn't get in the way. If it does not get in the way its already boring. Friction, being of interest, is forever lubricated. It is similar to promoting probiotic culture in our body, we need some micro-organisms in our body, for our own good. Design as a machine, as a system, that reduces all friction to convenience is a problem. It is like an overdose of antibiotics. Designers need to forgo their insights, their possession of the secrets to turn our minds. And be human, vulnerable, off-the-mark again.
But who will take the extra pain? And why? When the easier and more convenient is just a outstretched-arm away it is always picked. Any true gamer will agree with me - an easy game is boring, no fun. A good game is a fine balance of the difficulty, the learning curve so-to-say and the rewards. Design needs to be like a good game, instead of always peddling cheap and uninteresting convenience. I want to play, not go to sleep.