Broken Forms

One of the most interesting things I found about many of the projects we looked at (the projects that seemed to have frustrating elements to them), was the seeming need to innovate broken forms. Much like House of Leaves or Only Revolutions, many of the projects we looked at seemed to take a traditional mode of expression (a web site/a book), and break it.

In the case of Danielewski’s works, I find the break to be intriguing and exciting. Somewhat scary – I’m not sure how I’m supposed to read them if there’s even a how to be found – but overall engaging and stimulating in a manner that makes me want to read them rather than avoid them. In many of our projects, however, I decidedly felt alienated and repulsed. Of course, one could attribute this to the fact that website design is a profession for me, and dealing with websites that break from convention is both threatening and frustrating for me as a professional – not a very interesting interpretation. Instead, I think there’s a reason why some innovators produce forms that are engaging and others repulsive.

The book is a very mature form. It has been evolving for over two thousand years and is still evolving today. For this reason, I think that the form of the book has become embedded in our culture. There is no longer any apprehension when we open a book as to its contents – words, chapters, pages, and even white space (shape poetry, etc) have all become conventions of the book.

Websites, on the other hand, hold none of the same surety of the book. There may be conventions, true, but because of the (brilliant) nature of the web (anyone can publish anything, anywhere, with any form), we have no idea what we’re going to get when we click on a link. It may be a fantastic website (whatever that means), a broken website, or it may not even be a website at all – spyware anyone? That isn’t to say that surety isn’t developing – there have been numerous articles this year on how confidence in online shopping during the holiday season is increasing (even my mother is converted) – but that there isn’t the same financial responsibility in creating a website that there is in other forms of publishing (books, magazines, etc).

If you look at websites where there is a large degree of monetary investment (large corporations, web design companies, companies whose entire revenue stream depends on their online presence), you see a strong adherence to design conventions. Interestingly, many of the projects we looked at this semester broke from these conventions, but not, in my estimation, in a productive way. They tried to alter the way you interacted with the website in a very concrete way (whatever that means) – you could click on this but not that, links were invisible, text moved, you couldn’t go back to previous pages, etc. In some ways this is innovating form, but then again if Danielewski chose to produce books with pages stuck together he would also be innovating form (I would categorize this method of innovation as destructive, or negative, and akin to much of the innovation we saw in this class). I would not enjoy reading a book that forced me to soak each of the pages in order to read it, just as I do not enjoy reading a cyber text that forces me to fight my way through the content.