Ah, how I wish that this were published at a long-lived URL:
The one part of the web that I believe is truly genius, and that keeps standing the test of time, is the URI. The Web gave us a way to point to anything, forever. Everything else about the web has changed and grown to encyclopedic lengths, but URIs have been killing it for decades.
And yet the numbers show we’re hell-bent on screwing all that up with link-shorteners, moving URIs without redirection, and so forth. As always happens in technology we’ve taken a simple idea and found expedient ways to add fragility and complexity to it.
The Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures was FACT10. The album artwork was designed by Peter Saville. The words “Unknown Pleasures” don’t appear on the cover. Neither do the words “Joy Division”. Instead, the cover contains a series of 100 lines representing pulses from the first radio pulsar ever discovered—thanks to DameJocelynBell Burnell. It was a groundbreaking piece of graphic design. Its beauty lies in its simplicity: a two-dimensional representation of raw data.
That was almost thirty years ago. This week Radiohead released the video for the song House of Cards from the album In Rainbows …except it isn’t really a video at all. It wasn’t shot on film or video. It is a three-dimensional representation of raw data.
I expect that history will show “normal” mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this.
Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?
Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.
What was the Restoration again, please, miss?
The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.
The new Radiohead video isn't really a video at all. It's data visualisation. Here you can interact with the data points while the song is playing. I love this.