Modalists: perpetrators of modal [inter]activity. In Modalist design, the user is a black box for input and output. Modalists train their users to obediently shift their attention towards a preselected target. Modalists encourage serial actions and schizophrenic behavior.
Anti-Modalists: corrupt and pervert the constructions of Modalist design. Anti-Modalists are concerned with the dismantling of Modalist classifications: art versus science, actual or virtual, mind and body, man against machine, trees versus rhizomes. Anti-Modalists do things right the wrong way (or wrong the right way). We embrasse the inappropriate.
Modalists:
teach
Anti-Modalists:
do
Modalists:
use tools
Anti-Modalists:
dismantle tools
Modalists:
are concerned with the potential absence of a viewer
Anti-Modalists:
are concerned with the potential presence of a viewer
Modalists:
disguise authorship with simple non-linear structures
Anti-Modalists:
prevent authorship with complex non-linear structures
Modalists:
push buttons that don't look like buttons
Anti-Modalists:
break buttons
Modalists:
reduce noise
Anti-Modalists:
generate noise
Modalists:
discourage randomness
Anti-Modalists:
discourage predictability
Modalists:
believe in cinema
Anti-Modalists:
believe in performance
Modalists:
strive for correctness
Anti-Modalists:
strive for deception
Modalists:
attempt to simulate
Anti-Modalists:
attempt to fabricate
Modalists:
drive smart, shiny cards
Anti-Modalists:
buy used police cars and don't paint the fenders
Modalists:
talk about it
Anti-Modalists:
make fun of it
Modalists:
obey the rules
Anti-Modalists:
make up rules
I found this in a box of old files from my years at UCLA. I was feeling a bit oppressed by a number of forces, not the least of which were:
- A MFA program that frowned upon experimental interactivity because it was too difficult to teach.
- A good amount of incomprehensible hippie philosophy (i.e. A Thousand Plateaus).
- the spectre of the MIT Media Lab, which hangs over Media Art in a clinging miasma.
Posted by: Brandon at January 3, 2004 06:54 PM