We Are The Zombies, Not the Machines

Zombie Media – media that are living dead. This is a concept that Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz have developed for a while now. They recently published a mini-manifesto of a larger text, that is locked into academia unfortunately.

This is connected with the field of media archeology, which I think is a very interesting and confusing field. It feels like I should love it, but there’s something that bothers me about it. First I have to admit that I haven’t read any of the books on it, so I’ve probably misunderstood plenty of things. Let’s go through the 5 points of the mini-manifesto and see.

1. They oppose the idea of dead media, but they also talk about it. A lot. In fact, the idea of dead media seems crucial for the whole manifesto. So how does that compute? Aren’t there better ways to oppose the idea of dead media?

 

2. Zombie media are living dead, the authors claim. But… says who? I guess according to hi-def capitalism and its cynical idea of people-as-consumers. But what about all the people, not visible in the mainstream, who still use these media for the same reasons that others use mainstream media? Old people. Children. Poor people. Disabled. Demosceners. Me. Are we that irrelevant?

The machines are far from dead, atleast to us. So my question is: Doesn’t the zombie media concept completely surrender to planned obsolescence?

3. So there is a war on general-purpose computing, which seems highly urgent to address politically and pragmatically. The authors focus on practice, and argue for hacking the black boxes – echoing the free-and-open discourse (which deserves some scepticism). But how – and why – would the opening of technologies lead to something that we haven’t already seen?

4. The authors want to take media archeology into the art world. I don’t know, but didn’t that happen with chip/glitch in the 00′s, or the demoscene in the 90′s, or with all those Cages and Paiks of the 60′s? I agree that artists (and others, including me) need to engage more with technologies, and take it seriously. But I guess for me that means to master the tool, instead of bending it or something. Why should media archeological art build on appropriation and remixing?

5. Of course reuse is an important part of our culture. People don’t seem to be talking about much else these days. Everything is a remix and originality is a sin. But does that mean that we should promote remix culture even more? Doesn’t really seem necessary? It just seems Scandinavian. Why not just steal shit from the trash instead? Pay the guy at the recycling point to get some good machines. Why would an “open remix culture” be better than trashy hacking and computer love?

I never really liked archeology/anthropology so perhaps it’s not surprising that I don’t really get the ideas of zombie media. Why does it matter so much that it’s old? Why do we need to circuit bend and remix them, when they are amazing machines already? Why only focus on the differences?

The experts still haven’t figured out how they work. After 30 years the C64 is still not perfectly emulated. They are mysterious machines already. There is no need to hack them.

If there is a machine that should be hacked, it’s academia. If I was an academic I would do something about it before it’s 100% Google Scholar to anyone who doesn’t have leet access.

Meanwhile, the 8-bit computers work just fine. They are not the zombies. We are the zombies. We are the ones who are too lazy or busy to learn how to use them. That’s why I don’t believe that encouragement of appropriation and remixing and opening is going to amount to much. Just do your homework and stop fiddling around! :)

What Was Mainstream Chip in 2009?

I’m going through old post drafts for this little bloggie-blogg, and I’ve deleted about 20 of them so far. They were too good for this world.

But I came across a post-that-never-happened about mainstream chipmusic. As an initial research I was lurking around last.fm, to see which artists were the most popular. At the time those stats were pretty boring and pointless, but today they seem more interesting. Who remember anything about 2009 today?

As you can see the selection is pretty narrow, and there’s tons of important artists missing obviously. But these were the ones I checked before I found better things to do:

• Slagsmålsklubben (Sweden) 3,500,000
• Sabrepulse (UK) 1,400,000
• She (Sweden) 900,000
• Bondage Fairies (Sweden) 850,000
• Dubmood (Sweden/France) 750,000
• YMCK (Japan) 700,000
• Anamanaguchi (USA) 550,000
• Nullsleep (USA) 450,000
• Random (Sweden) 400,000
• Bitshifter (USA) 350,000
• Goto80 (Sweden) 200,000

There were a few popular artist at the time that I didn’t include, since they werent’s popoular at last.fm at all, despite big popularity elsewhere. DJ Scotch Egg, Meneo and Patric Catani were three of them.

Also, I guess there were bots to improve the last.fm-statistics, right? Iirc, some people (on this list) used those kinds of bots for MySpace.

My Presentation of 8-bit Users

Last week I made a presentation at Merz Academy called Hackers and Suckers: Understanding the 8-bit Underground. I was invited by Olia Lialina for a lecture series called Do You Believe in Users? in Stuttgart. This question should be understood in the context of a disappearing user in modern discourses on design. Computers have become normalized and invisible, and the user seems to have a similar fate. (read more in Olia’s Turing Complete User)

The talk was about 8-bit users, and the hype around 8-bit aesthetics. I talked about different 8-bit users – from those who unknowingly use 8-bit systems embedded in general tech-stuff, through stock freaks and airports, to chipmusic people and hackers. I explained how “8-bit” is both a semiotic and materialist concept, but often used as a socially constructed genre. 1950s music or 1920s textile can be called 8-bit today.

I explained what the qualities of 8-bit computing are, as based on my thesis: simple systems, immediacy, control and transgression. Some examples of technical and cultural transgression followed, and then I gave the whole “8-bit-punk-appropriator-reinvent-the-obsolete” speech and then dissed that perspective completely. Finally, I tried to explain my own view of non-antropocentric computing, man-machine creativity, media materialism, and so on. When I prepaired the presentation I called this Cosmic Computing, but I changed it because my presentation was already hippie enough…

• Humans cannot have a complete & perfect understanding of a computer.  Following ideas from Kittler – and the fact that 30-year-old technologies still surprise us – this seems controversial for computer scientists, but not so much for artists?
• Users bring forth new states, but that might be all normal for the machine. This is controversial for all ya’ll appropriatingz artistz, but not for Heidegger and computer scientists.
• All human-machine interactions are both limited and enriched by culture, technology, politics, economy, etcetera. Meaning that “limitations” and “possibilities” are cultural concepts that change all the time.
• Don’t make the machine look bad — don’t be a sucker. Make it proud! Another anti-human point, to get away from the arrogant ways that we treat technologies.

In hindsight, it was a pretty bad idea to be so anti-user in a lecture series designed to promote the user. (: And the discussion that followed mostly evolved around the concept of suckers. Some people seemed to interpret what I said as “if you are not a hacker you are a sucker”. This was unfortunate but understandable. I don’t mean that there are only two kinds of users. They are merely two extremes on a continuum.

Hackers explore the machine in artistic ways and they can be coders, musicians, designers — whatever. They are not necessarily experts but they know how to transgress the materiality/meaning of the hardware/software. They can make things that have never been done before with a particular machine, or something that wasn’t expected from it. That often requires not-so-rational methods, which is not always based on hard science. Just because you know “more” doesn’t make you better at transgression. There is a strong connection between user and computer. Respect, and sometimes a strong sense of attachment - even sexual? That’s probably easier to develop if you don’t plan to sell it when the next model comes out. (btw, this is not some kind of general-purpose-definition of the term hacker, just how I used it in this presentation)

Suckers, on the other hand, don’t seem to have this connection. They buy it, use it and throw it away. Either they don’t feel any connection to the object, or they don’t want to. They act as if they are disconnected from technology, and only suck out the good parts when it suits their personal needs.

It is a disrespectful use. The machines are treated merely as instrumental tools for their own satisfaction. Suckers are consumers to the bone. Amazing technologies are thrown at them, and suckers treat them as if they don’t even exist – until something stops working. Or they go all cargo cult.

I don’t like it when I act as a sucke.r, but it happens all the time. I recently got an iPhone for free. I’ve had it for months without using it, because I am scared of becoming a sucker 24/7. I am definitely not in charge of my life when it comes to technology. And I like that. Hm…

 

C64-sounds Hiding in Soundtracks: Interview With GMM

I was watching a documentary on TV about a Norwegian artist called Pushwagner (born 1940). Suddenly I heard arpeggios. And ring modulation. And wavetable drums. Hm, what’s this C64 stuff doing in a documentary like this, I thought. That raised some questions, so I got in touch Gisle Martens Meyer who made the music for Pushwagner, and he was kind enough to answer my questions.

It turns out that he once smashed an Amiga 500 on stage, composed MODs and also made some more recent chip-releases under the name Ninja 9000. But I was curious about how he works with chip sounds for soundtracks. Apparently he always uses SID-sounds, more or less, but some clients are more conservative than others…

Listen to the Pushwagner songs on Soundcloud (fyi, Goblin Roadtrip is the most chippy one)

CHIPFLIP > Could you tell us a little about the process behind it? Was it your idea to include these sounds? Did you have any specific ideas behind it?

GMM > Actually the process of providing music to the film is less old-skool writing-to-locked-image and more supplying-directors-with-material-to-work-with. The directors had access to all my stuff during a rather long production period, for maybe four years I think. So they always worked on the film with bits of my music (from all of my projects), but I didn’t write specifically for them during this preproduction. I just kept releasing stuff, or giving them unreleased stuff.

Then, during editing, the last six months, I’m properly involved, mostly in discussing track or cue selections, and if they need musical edits to fit their cuts I arrange it as we agree. In some cases I rewrite or adapt tracks so they work better with the scene. So it’s not scoring in a traditional sense. The directors work with mostly finished music all the time. I work like this with multiple directors, it’s like a sliding scale from sync license to adaptive score… So to answer the question; no – I did not “add” the arps and SID stuff there during scoring, the directors did by choosing those tracks, and we actually discussed their sound and how/if they would fit.

The directors (like me) grew up with C64 and Amigas and we all love those sounds, but also know they could appear alien, depending on context. So it wasn’t me, it was all of us making a deliberate choice.

CHIPFLIP > Did you or the directors have any relation to the demoscene?

GMM > I can’t remember if the directors were active sceners or quietly contributing / creating without making it public… So I can’t speak for them. I was a young and clueless musician and didn’t really participate much in groups or front of scene, I was lurking far away. I made some music disks on my own, mostly under pseudonym Gnosis and through a Czech group called Torture Of Music. I think some of it is available in scene archives.

CHIPFLIP > Do you, or anyone else, think that the common associations of these sounds (videogames and 8-bit) was problematic for the atmosphere of the documentary?

GMM > No, and I never heard anyone else either, rather the opposite I think, it really works. The kind of people who would react negatively to SID-sounds wouldn’t watch this kind of documentary. If they exist, how can anyone not like those sounds…

I think people “into” these kinds of things recognize particulars, like it sounds like a C64. Other people just recognize or label it as “the kind of videogame sound”. Other people again (like kids) just like the bubbly fun or the playfullness of it.

And in general I think if you use SID-sounds – as any other sound – as a balanced musical element in a larger context, it works fine and it can hold it’s own. It’s just there and it sounds right.

CHIPFLIP > Some would say that by now, chipsounds stand on their own feet, separated from the 8bit/videogame thing. What do you think?

GMM > I agree and agreed a long time ago. I hear it lots of places in all kinds of contexts. It always makes me happy, there should be more :)

CHIPFLIP > What kind of feedback have you received?

GMM > Positive. Kids seem to love the bubbly C64 tracks. Adults seem to like the span of genres, sounds and atmospheres in the music. The soundtrack was featured in some online services like Spotify and Wimp when it was released. I don’t read reviews, but I understand the movie in general was well received. The score was nominated for best film music at the Norwegian film awards Amanda this summer, and is also nominated for Nordic Film Composer Awards.

CHIPFLIP > Did you use SID-sounds for other soundtracks aswell?

GMM > Yes, always, and got them into several, but mostly as an element and not complete solution. And sometimes very subtle, like a cameo…. I also did some conceptual work on a film score using deliberate Amiga Protracker sounds and programming, but that one has been in funding phase for ages. But curiously I note that in my TV work there is rarely room for or approval of SID-sounds. TV is perhaps more conservative.

CHIPFLIP > When your SID sounds are not approved in TV-productions, how is that usually expressed? What do they say that they don’t like?

GMM > It’s never an angry director or producer wanting to remove it, it’s usually intuitive understanding by me not to waste time trying to sneak it in, because there is so little time for everything in TV. I usually work with people I am very well in sync with, so I mostly just “know” it wouldn’t work, because of the total sound or aesthetics of the series or project. I am sure there are situations where it would work wonders, I just haven’t been exposed to them yet.

Like I did a sci-fi puppet series for kids, and the sound was “orchestral symphonic”, and trying to make it “hollywood”. I didn’t even think of chipsounds, it didn’t fit. But I can use “chip” techniques, like a subtle one-time +12 octave arp at the start of sounds to make it stand out quicker for a theme signal, things like that.

I think TV is often shorter “everything”, shorter time for production, shorter span for telling something, shorter room for experimentation. TV’s just hectic, in all ways. That’s maybe why less chip there, or if it’s there, it’s really obvious there. Don’t know. Interesting to think about, good questions!

Are Humans More Disabled Than Ever?

This long post will provoke some of you, and feel free to lave a comment. I just want to clarify something first. The purpose of this post is to examine the similarities between how we talk about lo-fi computing and human disabilities. It is not about comparing machines with humans, but rather about the dominant discourses surrounding limitations and capabilities in general.

I was watching football 5-a-side, where more or less blind people play soccer in teams of five. Blindness, as you know, is considered as a handicap because visual culture makes it difficult to live without the small part of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans call light.

Playing blind football might seem absurd at first, but I was completely fascinated by it. The TV makes it look clumsy as the players stumble, fall, look for the ball, etcetera. But from a sonic perspective (sic) there is something very different going on. The players are navigating with sound, as the ball makes noises and your team shouts instructions for you. They create a small new world on the field. And it’s inaccessible to us who look at it.

Just like I initially valued 5-a-side as a less elite form of football, lo-fi computing is often seen as something less worthy by most people. Or perhaps it’s more worthy – “the results are good eventhough the tools are bad”. It doesn’t matter – it’s all centered around the same basic idea. Hi-fi is more useful, expressive or productive. It is the norm from which we value other things, just like with the human body. Perhaps some of you find it offensive, but I see many parallells between the mainstream discourses of low-res media and human handicaps. Specifically, the political discussions about them are often polarized between the “objective” and the “social”.

Social vs Objective

The objective model sources the problem to a single entity (human and/or machine) and is as such an ahistorical, essentialistic or psychological understanding. According to the social model, the physical ‘impairment’ is a problem mostly because society is not willing or capable to deal with it. This seems to be the dominant model today, adopted by e.g World Health Organization. But there is much confusion in terminology, and there doesn’t seem to be a term that will work in all contexts (disability, handicap, impairment, etc). And why should it? Why should there be a word that grouped together blindness, autism, crippled people and cerebral palsy?

The conflict that the two models are organized around is obviously an on-going process with very real consequences for people’s well-being, of which I’ve had some experiences during the past four years. I’ve seen how hard it is to deal with bureaucracy and daily life.

Are we more disabled than ever?

According to WHO, fifteen percent of the world’s population is disabled. That’s an increase of 5 percentage points since 1970, which is quite noteworthy. It’s not a fact – it is an estimate that varies with the choice of methods and terminology.  Nevertheless, we seem to think of ourselves – in general, in the developed world – as more ‘handicapped’ than before. We need drugs to be normal. We require digital tools to organize our daily life. Our knowledge has become prosthetic. And our lifestyle affects the prevalence of certain diseases and diagonses.

It could be argued that humans are handicapping themselves by creating machines that do the things we want to do, but cannot do ourselves (see this documentary). Or – are humans and machines working closer together to create a better world?

Whichever perspective is taken, it seems that in a techno-consumerist society, normal humans are not good enough in themselves. Post- or transhumanism is perhaps a taste of what is to come when we further develop glasses, hearing aids and artificial organs (btw, new aesthetic is back).

One possible consequence is that we accept more kinds of sensory perceptions and lifestyles. Perhaps we can learn to to respect and take advantage of the unique characteristics of each so called disability. Deaf police are better at video surveillance. There is (was :() a blind kid who relies mostly on sonar navigation. Deaf people perceive sound and make music. And so on.

But it is probably naive to think that the conflicts will disappear. There are norms to relate to and those norms grow from limitations of human perception and, in the case of computers, from progress as second nature. The conflicts concerning human disabilities is a much more pressing matter than legitimizing low-res computing. Perhaps this post has contributed with something, without offending too many people.

But the main purpose is to build a background for a future post about limitations in computing. Coming soon!

► Omri Suleiman – Music For a 15 Year Old Me

A lot of chipmusic releases today is either “modern” or “chip”. Very few artists seem to pull off both, at the same time. This is exactly what Omri Suleiman does!

Music For a 15 Year Old Me builds on an oft-forgotten origin of chipmusic (crack intros) and fuses it with techno, house and UK hardcore from the 1990s. The results? A new future for chipmusic!

Stream and download for free at http://chipflip.org/05.

Crafted by the long-lost Amiga scene musician Omri Suleiman, it fuses dancefloor bass with sound tracker magic to form a refreshing mixture of crack intro mystics and dancefloor energy. Occasionally it has a similar machinic atmosphere to that of early Autechre, and other times it sounds like skilled guitar solos and computer ballads. As a plus, the original files all fit on a single floppy disk!

As usual, Chipflip doesn’t try to emulate the album form. Instead, this is more similar to a music disk with its eerie PETSCII  interface by Raquel Meyers and GotoAT. The MP3-archive is also available at archive.org.

Music For a 15 Year Old Me is Omri’s attempt to reach back to his teenage self, back when he was working with Amiga groups like Anarchy, Magnetic Fields and Scoopex. He was making chipmusic before the term even existed. Omri:

At that time maybe we referred to them more often as intro tunes, rather than chiptunes. The requirement that, after the copy protection was removed, a crack intro to publicise the group could be placed in the unused first sector of the floppy disk meant that the music had to be less than 10kb in size.

Eventually, Omri also started to perform in the London underground scene in acts like Afterglow and Invisible Technologies. They played live using two Amigas and a Yamaha music computer. While most of that music has been lost today (Raw EP on Beautiful Records is an exception), it is clear that Music For a 15 Year Old Me picks up on the ambience of Detroit techno, early UK hardcore and house. The process behind the release is also a nod back to himself:

To consider the only relevant audience to be, me, 20ish years ago – frees the creative process of considerations and conformities and fashion which can sometimes limit my approach to writing music.

In order to facilitate this concept, all of the songs have been produced using only a sound tracker type program (Milkytracker in this case), with the only sample editing being that available inside the tracker.

Which also means : no filters, no reverbs, no synths, no channel EQs or compression, no effects apart from those you program yourself by manipulating the pitch, volume or sample offset.

Here’s hoping that teenage Omri will pick up on this release, and respond with some more Suleiman music. To read Omri’s own words about this release, visit musicfora15yearoldme.com.

Slow-Tech as the New Religion

Is slow-tech a useful concept for the study of low-tech action? It seems to be on the rise in the form of apps that help you to lead a slower life. But what is it? Is it something more than just a counter-reaction to capitalism & speed?

Slow-tech defines itself in opposition to e.g fast food and the instant gratification of consumerism. When I first heard the term slow food there were all these connections to environmentalism, health, spa, buddhism, etc. I guess it came from San Francisco? (eh, no, stfu)

Apparently, this is called the slow movement and it appeared in the 1980′s. It’s the anti-thesis to the high speed of modern society (>-Virilio -<), but is framed more as a sort of consumer-health-issue in an idealised harmonic society, than something political. It’s still about consuming. It’s still about equilibrium. And for me, ultimately, it seems like a form of wellness - when you make individual choices to get a “successful lifestyle”.

The slow web makes more sense to me. The key features of the slow web has been described as Timely (not real-time), Rhythm (not random) and Knowledge (not information). It sounds very reasonable. In fact, maybe it’s even a bit too reasonable?

I agree that these things are important for a sort of modern media literacy. We need to learn how to deal with the tools and information of today. And probably, we need technology’s help to do it. It can help us to reduce stress by structuring shores, or motivate us by turning real-life sequences into “games” where you collect points and get more things done in your life. Augmented reality, etc.

But idk. Slow? Is that really so good? Looking at e.g slow-tech, it seems like a postmodern version of the californian ideology. There is an underlying idea that technologies can help individuals to become more free. That should basically be the purpose of technologies. So there is still a lot of nature-culture divide in there. In short, it’s antropocentric. Connect your body to AppStore – be successful and happy.

To be blunt: the slow movement sounds like a lazy, ego-centric, new agey and half-arsed alternative to consumerism. Speed isn’t bad, per se. Maybe speed is just what we need to get some *real* alternatives together.

Yesterday I saw The Take (2004) about workers reclaiming abandoned factories in order to make a living. There is a fitting slogan in there: occupy, resist and produce. To me that sounds better than … you know … slow tempo, sustainability and individual health. Less weed, more speed!

If you are interested in stuff like this, I recommend the documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis.

After the Trackers: John Cage Bukkake

Trackers have remediated plenty of Western ideas of music. Typical time signatures (4/4) and tonality (12-TET) are the most obvious. Less apparent is the distinct separation between instruments and notation; sound and code. Most trackers force the users to make strictly defined instruments which sound basically the same every time it’s triggered. As such, trackers are essentially the opposite to modular synthesis, where anything can modulate anything (ideally).

Perhaps that’s why trackers never seem to go mainstream. They are too deterministic and controlling. Too manual. The contemporary way is to have fun with stuff you can’t understand: nothing is a mistake á la Cage. It’s okay too be lazy, 2 cool 4 skool. So trackers like Renoise are going that way too, and seems to be getting pretty bloated in the process.

In a similar way, some of the most talked-about chipmusic tools are not trackers. New physical interfaces like Gatari and C64 keytar are obvious examples, but sometimes software also gets some attention. Nanoloop, of course, can be seen as a precursor to the now popular grid interfaces. Viznut’s Ibniz is more of a mathematics tool, but it got a lot of attention earlier this year. It’s been designed to make text-based generative works with a tiny filesize (sometimes called ?bytebeat). Since Ibniz works with both visuals and sounds, it also blurs the boundaries between visual interface and content, like little-scale also demonstrated a few days ago.

For me it seems clear that visuals and music will melt together in new forms of interfaces in the future. Let’s look at two experiments that can give some pointers for the future of low-tekk composing: Gijs Gieskes’ TVCV-sequencer and Chantal Goret’s mouse-controlled Crazy Box!

Judaism and Japan: Looking for ASCII art theory

I’ve worked a lot with text-based works lately. There is surprisingly little research on ASCII art and related things. That’s why, together with A Bill Miller, I’ve written an academic article on ASCII art which will hopefully be published after the summer. It’s also quite difficult to find good archives or exhibitions. So me and Raquel Meyers started a tumblr at text-mode.tumblr.com where we select some of the best works in teletext, ASCII, Shift_JIS, RTTY, Petscii, etc.

ASCII art, text-mode art, unicode graff or whatever you want to call it, is still quite an open field (atleast over here in alphabet-land). And, I might be wrong, but I can see an increased interest for it; after pixel art romantics and after the language-mania of social/humanistic science. Objects, biology and realism are becoming relevant again. So it’s time to see what happens with text when it’s used and understood as objects rather than symbols.

One important precursor that is rarely discussed is micrography, which shares some traits with contemporary digital text art. It is a Jewish form of calligram where graphics are built up from hebrew text characters. It came from the biblical hate towards images. In short: text is the only way, and images are not allowed. Doesn’t leave much choice for a visual artist. Great!

Israel’s ASCII art moneyz

It is not only an old and obscure rule. Israel’s bills are still made in accordance with this, as shown in the picture above (zoomed in here). So then the images are actually not images. There are several modern examples of micrography, which often overlaps visual poetry, concrete poetry, etc.

Unlike artists of the early 20th century who used text (Picasso, dadaists), micrography was basically a functional necessity. In that way it is similar to a lot of modern text art, that uses text-based media (Twitter, SMS, textboards). Another similarity is that the symbolic meaning of the letters are irrelevant in micrography (so in that sense it’s actually not a form of calligram). The text characters are selected for their appearance, not for what they represent. This is why, in 2SLEEP1, music was credited as instructions and graphics as objects.

CTRL+C & CTRL+V: SUH-UH-SUH-UH, SUH, UH-A-UH-A-UH-A-SUH-A-SUH-A-SUH-UH-UCK-UCKA, SUH-UH-A-UCKA DICK, A-DICK-DICK

Working with our text-mode tumblr over the past months, I’ve come to realise that a lot of the best text art is from Asia, mostly Japan. One explanation is that Japanese and Chinese are more popular than English online, so it’s a matter of quantity. Another explanation is that text-based media, like 2channel are extremely popular in Japan. It creates memes and characters that appear also in mainstream media. Perhaps a text-based medium can become more popular in Japan because there are more nice-looking and useful characters, but probably also because Japanese writing/reading works differently than here. Is Japan a more “text-based” culture, maybe?

I’ll leave you with an example of Shift_JIS ANSI, which is rather new to me. Colours and Shift_JIS characters ftw! Eat cheese, please!

By Gatchaman

Why Videotex is Better Than the Web

Videotex was one of the precursors to the web, invented in the early 1970′s. It’s a two-way communication standard that uses a standard television set and a modem, and was used for both commerce, leisure and art.

Viewdata is one form of videotex. In the USA it was mostly known as Viewtron, and reached some 15,000 users before it was cancelled. It was unsuccesful since most consumers simply do not have a need nor a desire to access vast computerized data-bases of general information (A. Michael Noll, 1985). But in France, there was apparently a need for exactly that. Minitel still had 10 million connections every month when it was shut down in 2009. (one reason is that the French government gave away plenty of terminals for free)

Videotex is slow and lacks graphical details. But on the other hand – it’s  easy and direct. You plug it in, and you’re set to go. Wi-fi. In the comfort of your TV-couch, instead of your computer work chair. CRT-lifestyle! No annoying operating system, no maze of protocols that control your interaction.

It’s actually quite easy to get sucked into the magic of Videotex advertising. There’s something very appealing with it. No more overload! No www-addiction! Oddly enough, it was actually markated like this already in 1983 – described as an alternative to information overload. Check out this video, for example.

My own fascination might come from growing up in Northern Europe, where videotex’s sibling teletext has always been quite popular. In fact, it is really popular. About 25% of Sweden’s total population checks out teletext on TV - every day. In Denmark it’s almost half! And it’s just not just on TV. There are teletext apps for smartphones that are some of the most popular ones around here. Last year, the most popular iPad app was public service teletext. Yeah!

Scandinavia is extremely into both internet and news. So these are informed choices, or atleast not a choice made from a lack of options. But is teletext just something that old people are into? Or is teletext used by young people too, as an alternative to the spam freedom of the web?

It’s likely an old tradition in decline. But at the same time, I can definitely see a demand for a cheap, reliable, ad-free service with Twitter-like shortness in the future too. And if you want to go a bit more luxurious with a two-way communication, videotex is your lady!

Also, it’s worth mentioning that teletext and videotex doesn’t have to use text graphics and a low amount of colours. Take for example the amazing Telidon, developed in Canada around 1980. It is an alphageometric standard that works with changeable fonts and vector graphics instead. Telidon looks incredibly good in my eyes. It’s a shame that the UK won the standardization war, otherwise teletext might’ve been even more popular today.

Or maybe the text graphics are actually part of the winning concept. More reliable; more serious. That might be. But just look at these Telidon wonders! (and if you want more, check out text-mode.tumblr.com)