It’s funny how, even in an art museum, where you’d expect people to be hip to such things, I’ll be looking at a Jackson Pollock painting and someone will say “I don’t get it”.
So let me sum it up: a Jackson Pollock painting is Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock.
Jimi Hendrix (1942−1970) grew up in a world where recorded music was everywhere, and new technologies brought near-perfect “high fidelity” stereophonic recordings into the home. Not only could you buy your favorite song, you could buy your favorite performance of a song, and musicians had an incentive to make each performance different from the studio version to sell more tickets & “live” records.
Freed from the need to make each performance the same as the last, musicians were able to reduce a performance down to its essentials. Instead of sounds organized by easily performed measures, refrains, and codas, musicians like Hendrix used their instruments as amplifiers of emotion, props in a audio-visual display of raw feelings. Rock out a soulful solo, play the guitar with your teeth, then set it on fire.
Jackson Pollack (1912−1956) died while Hendrix was still a kid, but he came of age in the heyday of the Brownie camera, a simple camera whose $1 price tag made it ubiquitous. His drip period started about ten years after color film hit the market. To that point, most paintings were portraits of people or moments frozen in time. Even pointillists drew recognizable forms. But affordable color cameras meant anyone could capture their own images of Aunt Gertrude in her new hat.
Early Brownie camera (courtesy Wikipedia)
Like Hendrix, Pollack was inspired to reduce painting to its essentials. No longer tied to traditional forms, he experimented with materials and abstract ways of expressing his conflicting emotions through paint and canvas. The image hanging in a gallery is only the output of one performance, echoes of the motions, grunts, and groans as he literally attacked and embraced his media.
Today’s young computer engineers and designers pecked at the keys of a computer long before they could read the letters on the keys themselves. There’s no sense of intrinsic amazement when they sit down in front of a PC. The banality of computing, coupled with cheap, disposable microprocessors like Arduino, is leading to a new generation of devices that don’t look like traditional computers.
IBM 5150 (courtesy Wikipedia)
Products like Supermechanical’s Twine are the Woodstock guitar solo of the information age.
Twine is a wireless module tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. The module has WiFi, on-board temperature and vibration sensors, and an expansion connector for other sensors. […] The Spool web app makes it simple to set up and monitor your Twines from a browser anywhere. You set rules to trigger messages — no programming needed. The rules are put together with a palette of available conditions and actions, and read like English: WHEN moisture sensor gets wet THEN tweet “The basement is flooding!”
- Twine sales pitch
Twine
Stripped of the need for affordances such as keyboard or display, Twine expresses a single emotion: apprehension. A Twine on your basement wall embodies your fear of flooding. The Twine on your washing machine is your guilt for letting laundry sit between cycles. It may not be as beautiful to the ears as a Hendrix guitar solo or as visually stunning as a Pollack, but the essence is the same.