This article reminds me of the everlasting internal struggle between calling myself an artist or a designer. In a world where art can take on many forms, subjectivity is key. This concept is similar to what Alexander R. Galloway writes about in “Jodi’s Infrastructure.” The article challenges the idea of functionality vs usability, and how the digital world can serve as a medium for artists to develop their ideas.
We tend to see the internet as this tool that is used to solve the majority of our problems, given the convenience of making powerful moves with the click of a button, however, the article really brings out a good point about not limiting the use of the World Wide Web just to the greater good, but also as a way to express ourselves–given that you know code.
I think one of the most interesting aspects of Alexander R. Galloway’s article
is when he challenges the idea of subjectivity and functionality in a website “In the modern “on” mode, infrastructure
is everything. Content dissolves into context, and context itself becomes content. Hence the great mantra of modernity
is “there is no content”—or, as Marshall McLuhan famously put it, “the medium is the message”—since all content is
overwhelmed by context.
By contrast, in the non-modern, premodern, or postmodern mode of working “within,” content is what it is, no more and no less. Here content provides its own context, and the environment grows in accordance with the emergent emanations of the inside. No larger transcendental category arrives like a conquistador to command and encompass it from outside.”