THIS year I regularly borrowed a PowerBook Duo, a piece of oldish technology first released by Apple in 1992. It doesn't really have enough RAM to keep Photoshop, Express and Premiere open at the same time; I am not able to edit digital video while I'm on the DART; it's not feasible to receive and retouch photographs from reporters around the world with it, but luckily that's not a problem for me. It weighs about two pounds and you can write on it. It's what I need.
It's a lot like the Internet in that respect. It does its job. So I've decided that, when it comes to technology, I am always right. I, by the way, am a customer. All year long people have been telling us about the future power of the Internet. About the new technologies being worked on by a bearded guy on a Classic Coke high, somewhere just outside San Francisco. Me, I could care less.
What about this: say, instead of looking for the Holy Grail of perfect reproduction (surely we should have talked ourselves out of such obviously meaningless objectives by now anyway) everything starts to move in a lo fi, lo res direction. This is, after all, exactly what the Internet is good for right this minute. The World Wide Web might be very good transferring texts and even rich colour graphics (depending on your monitor, of course) but when it comes to the higher functions it tends to be left slightly embarrassed.
It is naturally very difficult to get TV quality pictures over the Internet, although it seems increasingly possible to get jerky QuickTime movies, and idiotic, puerile Shockwave animations, mad, phasing radio programmes and the like. So why don't we all take the lead of 1996's pioneers and head downmarket, reproduction wise. Wouldn't it be a terrific idea to exploit the medium's present capabilities? Spare us the animated scuba divers and write something we want to read.
Those involved in selling hardware are very keen to celebrate the virtues of 64-bit addressing, but some clever content providers have been moving in the opposite way: Just take a look at alt.art.ascii to see just how much can be done with that simple American Standard Character set. And my god, even better, these same characters can be formed into... words!
We want films to look like films, television to look like television; why do we want the Internet to look like film or television and sound like CD or FM radio? In 1997, we may come to appreciate the unique flavour of the medium and work with its potentials, rather than let marketers postpone our dreams until Version 2.0 arrives.
Artist to watch:
Finola Jones. Anyone who bumped into the artist's baby elephant of pink silk roses at the Green on Red gallery this year would have to be curious to see what creatures break loose from Jones's possessive circus in 97.
This year's Must Sees:
1. RealAudio - which allows you to broadcast live in real time via the Internet - is the most convincing Net radio tool yet. No painful pauses while the file downloads. Download and plug in.
2. Lo-fi Digital Artist Sean Hillen: the image maker most likely to turn us off the dsytopia featured in his work, and on to glue and paste.
3. Ireland's premiere web designer Nua, making cyberspace safe for the Celtic spiral, and putting the funk in functional.
4. PointCast, an information mining robot. The closest you can get to an intelligent agent for free. Download and plug in.
5. eMate: Apple's new, stripped down notebook for children. It could drive you back to school.
6. Be,Inc.'s (the company founded by Apple windfall Jean Louis Gassee) wondrous new graphic interface. Expect to see it soon on a Mac and a Mac clone, and then on your PC. Eat dust, Bill!
