Friday, August 6, 2010

Communal Typewriter!

This week I worked on developing a concept to work on for the rest of the semester for studio.

I have had a few ideas floating around during the term break, and one that really rose to the surface for me was to work with a typewriter.
For some reason I am really fascinated with typewriters, I guess largely because I had never used or even seen a typewriter in person.

To have such a global content generating tool completely disappear from use is quite amazing, especially when you consider the quantity that must have once existed.
Pursuing this interest I bought an antique typewriter from TradeMe. It is an Underwood No.5 and it is a beauty. I had not really thought of how complex a typewriter would have to be, forgetting the fact that it would be 100% mechanical. I am so used to electronic and electro-mechanical devices that I forget how much of a shortcut electricity offers.

With this complexity come incredible craftsmanship. Sure, these machines were mass produced, but the precision and complexity of many of the components suggests that many parts were hand-made. I have some skills in fabrication, but my mind boggles to think of how some of these components were made, to such a high degree of precision. Despite an Underwood No.5 being a huge and heavy machine, the components are packed in tight.

My concept that I put forth incorporates concepts Ryan and I explored last semester with the Hungry Is Me project. We explored the concept of shared decision making, and I wanted to further this idea with seeing if the anonymous public would be capable of producing coherent output. Text output is a good medium for assessing coherency, as a word is instantly recognisable as being correct or not. Mistakes in a word or a sentence often can still be interpreted too.

With these concepts in mind the plan I came up with was to produce an installation which required visitors to the installation to interact with a typewriter, with their actions governed by the anonymous public on the internet.

I would spatially separate the input and output of the typewriter, so that the people with the installation would not be capable of informing their input based on the output.
This would be done by method of re-routing the keys, so the typewriter would be actioned from a considerable distance. I would also scramble the mapping of the keys so that someone who doesn't require a visual feedback loop to type would still not be able to produce logical output by themselves.

The input device would suggest a key to action through some electrical means, controlled by a computer that is processing the data coming in from the internet.

With this setup, the only way to produce coherent output would be for both the anonymous public and the public present at the installation to cooperate. Sure this is asking a lot, but that is largely the point.

Tags: typewriter interface installation public anonymous

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