If we take at least as hypothetical truth my previous assumption that the Internet bears uncanny parallels to the Universe, it is in interesting to begin a discourse on the translation of both the conceptual and physical properties of the Universe onto its microcosm -- the man-made web of chaos and information that is the Internet. After all, the guiding laws of the world are physical ones -- properties of physics. Are graphical web browsers, designed to aid people in their navigation through an otherwise conceptually baffling system, analogous to natural structures? After all, they must have been designed with usability in mind, and the explosive popularity of Netscape in the early 1990's must have been due -- to a certain extent -- to its intuitive ease of use. Our computer memories are organized in files and folders, for example, so that the lay computer user isn't intimidated by the digital cataloguing of information. Software designers refer to these as "metaphors;" the Apple Computer style guide urges programmers to "use metaphors that represent concrete, familiar ideas, and make the metaphors obvious, so that users can apply a set of expectations to the computer environment." Were windows and this click-by-click navigation we are now so accustomed to similarly designed to ease the blow of something as interminably complex as the World Wide Web, let alone the internet?
After all, if the ultimate goal of science is to understand the physical world through the taxonomy of its physical properties, then understanding the internet should be a similar gesture. In any case, I think that the internet and the Universe do share at least one galactical characteristic: they both have a sun.
The world of the internet is a visual one, of course, and in following suit has particularities which shadow the visual world of our day-to-day. There are many things we take for granted in our web browsing because they are so intuitive; most of these are, in fact, illogical. For instance, the presence of shadows. Many, if not most, websites -- especially those designed for quotidian use -- contain "buttons" and other such interactive dialogs.
Is there any rational reason why these buttons must appear three-dimensional, and, when pushed, manifest their depression through a change in shading? These, as well as the rest of the widespread use of shadows throughout the World Wide Web appear logical to us because we are accustomed to a three-dimensional world, a world of shadows. However, the internet has no sun nor any single light source. It certainly not does not have the imaginary and suggested sun of push-button dialogs, which implicitly always lies, incidentally, in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
Where is the digital sun? If these were real shadows, the light source would be somewhere in the upper left, just out of the view of our screens. What is that, West? Doesn't the real sun set in the West? Is the Digital Sun the inverse of our Galaxy's real sun? Perhaps it has nothing to do with astronomy, but rather with our understanding of linearity. After all, we read from left to right, and in following suit understand linear progression as being, in some sense, from the left to the right. Whether reading precedes this conception, or this conception is a product of language, is something yet to be determined. The design of platform video games -- Super Mario, for example -- similarly relies on left to right movement and the implicit drive to always want to know what is just out of sight on the right-side, since this is the side which leads to resolution, the end of the sentence.
In any case, one thing is for sure -- as far as I know, the digital sun never sets.
Hi guys! This jam is a more serious version of a Power Point lecture I gave for part of a We Two & The Universe performance with Jona at PS1 MoMA.
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Actually in computer graphics such as opengl etcetera there is a specific light source or "sun" specified. The sun does rise and set also. This is done using lamberts law.
Lambert?s law: the radiant energy D that a small surface
patch receives from a light source is:
D = I x cos (theta)
I: light intensity
theta : angle between the light vector and the surface normal. As the light source moves angle theta decreases to the angle of incidence causing an effect called attenuation of light.*(dusk)(gloaming)(Night)*
The official equation for the sun setting in the world of 1's and 0's
It is true that as humans we better understand systems in terms of metaphor mapping. With relation to button pushes though the shadow is not to make the user feel in a familiar three dimensional world so much as make the user feel as if they have physically pushed the button and thus received "physical" feedback that the button has been pushed. If there is no feedback the user pushes multiple times thinking that nothing has happened.
Richard,
The OpenGL you're thinking about is the 3D OpenGL, which is used in things like games and screensavers; environments that use "cameras" and the sun/light source positioning that you mention.
Web browsers aren't 3D.
Sure, we make web buttons and graphics 3D to make the user more comfortable and to provide much needed feedback, obviously... I think you're missing the abstract here.
as far as i know the angle of the internet sun is just the same as the one they call "golden light" (i'll have to confirm, but this is my rough understanding of it) in fashion photography. 45 degrees left from the vertical axis and 45 degrees above the horizontal axis. apparently it brings out the best in things shone upon.
Jona,
I know I was being a little glib and a little square with the spirit of the post. I was also aware that opengl is not used to program browsers. I just found what was being said a bit wilfully abstruse. I guess the tone of the article was making it sound like all this has happened sub-consciously in some cosmic mass that somehow represents our humanity, when in actual fact GUI design is painfully thought out and culturally significant. Don't get me wrong though, I do really like this blog. in fact it is one of the most interesting I have come across. Was just trying to get some dialog going.
Of course, the design of elements on the Web is in no way accidental -- I'm aware that this entry almost implies that the Web is an independent entitiy, forming its own physical rules. I'm more interested, however, in the almost ubiquitous use of lower-right drop shadows, which are related, obviously, to the direction we "read" a Website in: left to right, top to bottom. It's logical, since we read text from left to right, but the additional element of "reading" light from one direction to another is unique to the visual interface of the Web.
Oh god. This makes me the kind of person that comments on other people's blogs on my own, but:
http://www.opaque.net/~dave/2006/03/re-computers-are-interesting-part-two.html
Richard's comment, he described it as 'a little glib and a little square', follows from a very curious twist in your discourse Claire. I have some sympathy with Richard because it is a twist that also engage or provoked me during your presentations last weekend. The second part of your lecture, the part about the 'sun on the web' seemed to turn toward a kind of blatant anti-science, perhaps offered as lyric, or satiric folly playing upon various absurd implications of conventional web design. It where you begin to play a game of spieling-out falsehoods as though they were true. It's a very different voice than you usually employ. Reminded me of a 'pataphysical' discourse a la Alfred Jarry from the Dada days of the last century, a style or variety of personae widely celebrated as a proto-punk.
What's with that? Just geek comedy?
Rich (and Richard, and any other Rich-prefix names involved):
I'm glad that you noticed this discrepancy between the usual tone of Universe -- slightly facetious, always, but sincerely academic within its means -- and the tone of this last entry, which is an extrapolation of last weekend's pataphysical presentations.
(Jarry's defintion of pataphysics, "the science of imaginary solutions," might as well define literature, incidentally.)
To import the habitual pointedness of the Universe-blog into the format of the Universe-lecture would have been, I think, much too difficult. Universe, like anything on the web, floats on a web of preexisting information, archive, image, and hyper-linked reference. It is also, by virtue of being a Web-object, without real temporality. Like a book, It can be read and then ignored, "put down" and re-explored. There is a certain safety in this format.
The condensation of this into a presentable, outward, temporal human format seemed to me a difficult gesture. If I were to speak as I would write, the talk might come off as endlessly long and -- worse -- too earnest. I was interested, then, in tinkering with the form and tone. I think that the blog is fairly approachable, and wanted to convey this feeling to an audience.
"Geek comedy," as you put it, seemed like an interesting approach, as did the use of Power Point -- a medium I normally condemn, and quite vocally. The idea was to retain the outward sincerity I like to employ while creating a built-in defense to criticism directed at this sincerity.
By pronouncing the talk intentionally comedic, I felt free to play an only slightly exaggerated role of idiot-scientist-naif. And with this silliness already built in, I felt the audience could enjoy the talk on a superficial level while culling from it both its paranoiac and intellectual undercurrents.
And yes, I wanted to key myself into the absurd world of computers by adopting a tone of absurdity.
our entire reality is constructed through creating symbols, so that we can understand what it is we are observing. like language right? words are just symbols to help us communicate. so it only makes sense that we set up symbols on the computer that are direct representations of our world, to make it as easy to understand as possible so that it can be the most useful tool possible. this is why i would say that the mac is so much more successfully designed than pc. because its such a friendly object with easy to understand interface i don't mind using it everyday to get shit done.
Not to get too nerdical, but the Mac OS had a unified "light source" since the eighties. It got a little more complicated, with OS X circa 2000.
I think Computer is a magic through which I can explore the entire world.