The Joy of Silly Useless Software - Nathalie Lawhead
The infamous Clippy, desktop pets, ASCII art makers, user icon generators, cosmetic skins for UI, and so many absolutely “useless” aspects we part of using a culture until the streamliner, highly controlled app era. Yeah, many of these could be buggy (or outright performance decreasing,) and are seen by many designers as being even worse because of their clashing aesthetics, but as Lawhead explores in this essay (originally a talk for the gameZ & ruleZ conference,) there is a freedom implicit to these non-productive elements made simply because they were amusing or made the gray box of the desktop feel more personal. Especially in the era of platformization, standardization, and app store content controls, the essay points out that these supposedly useless pieces of software can actually be viewed as radical. Talking about their own work, the essay also lays out a clear path for how these outlying areas of joyfully useless computational history can serve as a rich, complex, welcoming alternative foundation for digital artworks.
Creator: Nathalie Lawhead
Link: http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/the-joy-of-silly-useless-software
Connections:
The rise of contemporary textile arts (Bear with me a moment if this seems like an odd connection: I think what Lawhead is talking about resonates with many similar places in art history where less prestigious mediums/techniques that were female-coded became highly generative and radical artforms that provided a welcoming alternative to the dominant high-polish masculine-coded production methods/mediums. For those who aren’t as aware of the history of gaming and computers, many of these pieces of “useless” software were perceived as being for young females, and thus less status than, say, big-budget 3D video games.)