As artists creating with the panoply of analogue and digital media available today, it is important to reflect on the way in which the tools we use guide, sometimes invisibly or unknowingly, the creative process. The tools, created for some historical reason, may influence our work in sometimes nefarious, and sometimes positive, ways. It is also interesting to me that the "techne" is very much fine art (referring here to the Greek debate of antiquity).
For instance, the laptop I am using to type this essay is a modern and powerful computational device. It is translating my thoughts and finger motions into HTML on down to voltages, which are interpreted as binary signals by transistors. I don't often pay attention to the two glaring anachronisms built into my laptop, and in some ways, my process. My laptop, which I use constantly to make music, produce videos, perform, and communicate, which is capable of talking to my phone and other computational devices, still sticks to old metaphors.
The first metaphor is the proscenium--the screen--which clings to the Commedia dell'Arte stage metaphor developed in the 14th century, though the metaphor can be traced to the ancient Greeks. Modern theater has attempted to do away with this "fourth wall", and the proscenium has become a derogatory term. Yet, we use this antiquated concept to do some of the most technologically sophisticated work. It is possible to think of many configurations of viewing and experiencing data that would be more advantageous than one designed for a parade of archetypes across a square stage: 3-D imaging, color maps, projections, and physical interfaces could be better used in different situations. Even just flipping the screen 90 degrees could change the way we think and work; all of the sudden we have a portrait, rather than a narrative.
Another vestigial metaphor is the qwerty keyboard. The typewriter inspired the first computer keyboards. The first computers, even the very elegantly conceived ENIGMA device used to encode and decode military messages, used a similar layout. The qwerty layout was a compromise developed by Christopher Lathem Sholes in 1873, and marketed by the Remington Arms company, which before making typewriters, made sewing machines and guns.
The action of the type bars tended to jam frequently; to fix this problem, Sholes obtained a list of the most common letters used in English and rearranged his keyboard from an alphabetic arrangement to one in which the most common pairs of letters were spread fairly far apart on the keyboard. Typists at that time used the hunt-and-peck method, and Sholes's arrangement increased the time it took for the typists to hit the keys for common two-letter combinations. This ensured that a type bar had time to move out of the way before the next one came up. (Sholes never imagined that typing would ever be faster than handwriting, which is less than twenty words per minute.) This Remington typewriter was very successful, and so this qwerty layout became the standard for all typewriters to follow.
Of course, this is not an optimal layout for all of the different uses a keyboard has on a modern laptop. It is rather ridiculous that we use this 19th century layout for performing music or for live image processing. The limited repertoire of movements, and the lack of a performance aspect of such an interface is frustrating, but yet, we use it. The spacebar has become a useful toggle, and the possibility of assigning certain letters to perform specific functions has become a standard feature of many software programs.
The Flash demonstration above, which I made with Meghan Trainor, is a montage of the influences on the qwerty keyboard in the course of history. In some sense, the interaction is aleatoric, just as history is. At least that is the metaphor constructed for the exploration by the user.
We tried to combine the historical scribe's tools and product; somehow get the wine press cum printing press in there to lead to the industrial revolution; when a sewing machine/gun manufacturer decided that people were typing to fast for the mechanism; which was getting all jammed up, hence the first typewriter looks like a sewing machine with the mechanism, deadly; which typewriter was so immensely successful that other more logical patterns were abandoned; such that when international business machine constructors began making other things, like personal computers, they used the same set up; when speed is such a priority and necessity that we carry around computational devices in our camel humps; so that even our art, drawn from the anachronism, ought not to suffer from efficiency!
Many objects, though old, still serve their original function, and sometimes very well. The authenticity of an object, as with a human being, is doing what it is meant to do. That is one reason why I find pipe organs, old houses, the subway system, classical aqueducts and viaducts, old people (that's a special category), etc., so fascinating. Threads of technology interweave over time, such that our century-old subway system coexists with a native American footpath (Broadway) through the center of an island famous for a wall by which businessmen traded in Dutch times.
