Aesthetic flattening occurs at the convergence of three traits culminated from human-computer interaction design:

Sensory: Unsatisfactory low-resolution audiovisual interaction exacerbated by the front-affixed design of webcams, audio with low fidelity and intelligibility, and data compression for bandwidth efficiency.

Interface: The reduction of body and identity from three dimensions to two, collapsed into a singular floating-head format that diminishes one’s ability to express oneself creatively and multimodally in the moment.

Justificatory: Universalist design thinking in tandem with the technological reuse for stacking and lower-cost contracting purposes, of which ethical and cultural ramifications remain unquestioned and in the background by capitalist demands to sustain the speed of production or relevance of human labor.

“The web doesn’t suck. Your websites suck. All of your websites suck. You destroy basic usability by hijacking the scrollbar. You take native functionality (scrolling, selection, links, loading) that is fast and efficient and you rewrite it with ‘cutting edge’ javascript toolkits and frameworks so that it is slow and buggy and broken. You balloon your websites with megabytes of cruft. You ignore best practices. You take something that works and is complementary to your business and turn it into a liability.”

—Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web
(Source: baldurbjarnason.com)

FRANCES STARK: All I know is that art is something that I want to do because I have seen it work. It functions. I could look at it, and that dead artist, every single thing that they meant, could go into my brain. It’s a magical technology.

I want to honor that magic. And that’s what it means to be a teacher. I can learn from Amanda, because she’s putting form in front of me. She’s thinking through form. I’m looking at her stuff and it’s blowing my mind. The form is the art. It’s why we do this. It’s not because we want a certain position in society, or to climb up the ladder, or to juke the stats to ensure that we get a raise. We do it because we revere the form and the physical ability to have thought in form. That is why we are here. And the administrators don’t believe in that religion—don’t see that form, or don’t even understand form.

We believe that form manifests and resonates in unexpected, magical ways that other things don’t.