The Poetics of Space Bars
(Tangential!) WHOA. Cool! I find the way Magnetbox sees the world, through an office memo of decades past, to be utterly compelling.
It reminds me of how much I loved the idea of PowerPoint to the People – a PPT presentation competition that David Byrne took part in – back in the day.
Bloggers like Earl Boykins are thinking in similar ways, Boykins presenting his obsession with indie music information as a series of colored graphs. Nicholas Felton’s brain goes to the same place, imagining and sharing with the world a year of his life in terms of an annual report. Craig Robinson of Flip Flop Flyin’ is on the same page, organizing his own history into personal pie charts.
Understanding and communicating the world through paradigms popularized in the mundane surroundings of an office extend to visual media, as well. Finally, Indexed realizes the world of pop philosophy (in the best sense of the term) in PowerPoint-friendly diagrams.
What does it all mean? The way we understand the world has always been informed by the tools we use. And now the tools aren’t swords or hammers, they’re pie charts.
