“It is impossible to express by words the glory, the splendor, the delicate gorgeousness which were softened into the beauty of this object. Nature’s ideal butterfly was here realized in all its perfection; not in the pattern of such faded insects as flit among earthly flowers, but of those which hover across the meads of paradise for child-angels and the spirits of departed infants to disport themselves with.” -Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
I get to this line. Stomach-pit-usual, I see the word perfect when perfect and I always have words, but can never get our stories straight. For whom do you make your objects shine? What is the insight of a butterfly when there is one butterfly and we are one butterfly, skipping on screen, and all our wings are engorged and tipped and we are one stepping horde and aren’t we fucking beautiful? Are you beautiful today?
“Most computer technologists don’t like to discuss it, but the importance of beauty is a consistent (if sometimes inconspicuous) thread in the software literature. Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology. … Beauty is important in engineering terms because software is so complicated…. Beauty is our most reliable guide to achieving software’s ultimate goal: to break free of the computer, to break free conceptually…. But as we throw off the limits, what guides us? How do we know where to head? Beauty is the best guide we have.”-Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
And now I know today’s laugh, like any other chortled beast: beautybeautybeauty, shineshineshineshineshineSHINE why can’t shine, why shine always sits in your gullet, and I reach for Beauty is a Verb like a lifeboat- all enacts in water. My body is an interface. My body is broken and unable to perform to specifications. It’s user friendly qualities are affixed to other spheres, so bodies without bodies because they are butterfly choose butterfly. A tome called one so they said no. I read “An Amputee’s Guide To Sex” by Jillian Weise and I don’t have anything left of this, I don’t have anything:
“Foreplay: To create an uninhibited environment for your partner, track their hands like game pieces on a board. For leg amputees, keep arms on upper body. For arm amputees, keep arms on lower body. Engage with like limbs. Keep half limbs out of reach. Your goal is to achieve a false harmony with their body
Sex: Mobility is key. If they see the half-limb then they become inhibited, nervous. They think, ‘Will it hurt like this? Would she tell me if it did?’ Mobility shows confidence. Think for two people. Know where your limbs are at all times; know where your partner’s limbs are at all times.”
…..I am 10 and my mother buys a one handed keyboard that I throw it into the garden. My mother is always the brunt of my beauty. I am always throwing interfaces into gardens; today will this screen be enough? My body is among the grass while I’m in the kitchen, red, learning to type to proper specification. Will I shineshineshine do I need some slicked-back-oil, do I need this other body yet or can we have 5 more minutes of some useless sex? As I hitched silicone to skin, my arm is in the yard but it is not mine. But it is interface, touch when my touch is without wing, without user friendly guidelines hitched to the umbilical cord, ok, I’d really like some fucking guidelines right now, is it for me? A gift of myself. Does my screen make you slit throat- get better beauty standards to define your technological specifications.
“Did you abdicate to beauty or pain? Say pain. It is easier for me to understand.”-Jillian Weise Think for all the walls and wrench yourself to pieces. Is one missing, they’ll say. These optional readings and I am always this: a relegated object, a relegated body, I am broken and I don’t have time, don’t take up time in their butterfly-classroom, take this talking arm with you on/for every occasion: I, or am I the way my stump swings? Don’t touch a crime scene, don’t talk to strangers, when every day the stump speaks and it say something different. Unwholesome mouth. Interact with me if you choose, but if a better scale comes along, I am slit throat. Am I in the room today?
“I want to be another poet. I want to be any other poet but me.”
***”Stomach-pit-usual, I see the word perfect when perfect and I always have words, but can never get our stories straight.”***
***”My body is an interface. My body is broken and unable to perform to specifications. It’s user friendly qualities are affixed to other spheres….”***
Drucker gives me hope, or at least a way to think about interfaces that is not in thrall to their normalizing function (and they do tend to normalize, to build horizons of expectations of what “users”–Drucker would say subjects — will do, which in turn means is built on horizons of expectations of what machines and humans can do, on the the body and mind of human and machine are like). She gives options, visions, that the optional readings do not: “The critical design of interpretative interface will push beyond the goals of”efficient” and “transparent” designs for the organization of behaviors and actions, and mobilize a critical network that exposes, calls to attention, its madeness- and by extension, the constructedness of knowledge, its interpretative dimensions” (178).