“User Friendly”
Today, life seems increasingly prescribed, recursive, normalizing. Stories depicted by mainstream media are increasingly divided. What are the conditions that enabled such narrowing experiences?
Pervasive computing is a term first created by Mark Weiss, the then CTO of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1988. Commenting on cumbersome mega computers that were difficult to be adapted into everyday life, Mark described the original intention of pervasive computing as “A less-traveled path I call the ‘invisible’: its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it.” Mark…
Who tells you what to cook for dinner?
Who tells you what to get your sister for the holidays?
Who tells you what to buy on Instagram?
Who tells you what jobs to apply for?
Who tells you how to vote, and what to believe?
It’s frightening. We are beginning to resemble blocks of code — tagged, categorized and archived for the purpose of enriching companies, electing politicians, and maintaining the status quo, or normalization — pushing everyone towards the identical degree of sameness.
Software as it is designed rules our lives. It is integrated into our daily experience in…
by Zhenzhen Qi & Yang Wang
As technologists and artists in new media (that strange place where words, imagery, meaning and new tech collide), we design, build, and test software experiences and products that center the deep creative impulse of humanity, because we are interested in the power of that impulse.
We’ve observed throughout our work that many computing and AI software and tools have underestimated, and even excluded, this human impulse from their design.
The particular joy of uncovering patterns and logic embedded in various functions of the universe, and building things that make use of them for people…
zzyw
zzyw is an art and research collective producing software, installations, and texts examining the cultural, political and educational imprints of computation.
