Analog by Night

I met you somewhere in a hell beneath the stairs
There’s someone in that room that frightens you when they go boom
Boom, boom, boom…

The color you say is black is the one you might lack
In the size of your eyes, is there a righteous prize?

I met you…

There’s something wrong with our hearts
When they beat pure they stand apart
In the black room, the light, watch the seabird fall
Real love, it finds you somewhere with your back to it

I met you…
You know, you know, we belong by the stream, to the dawn

Rick Spencer – Have you ever been away from something so long that when you’re near some semblance of it, you get innappropriately excited?

Ana Pirri – I’m the queen of inappropriately excited. What’s making you so?

Rick Spencer – Well, there’s a [creative person in a place I frequent], and it’s a woman, and she’s kinda cute, and super easy to work with, but this happens at conferences [also], and really any time i’m around other smart people and creatives. Male or female, I get this sort of low frequency urge to secure them in my life, and my body/brain translates that into sexual desire. It’s like I’m starving, but I get a little TOO turned on by food.

Ana Pirri – But rick, i can’t imagine you ever being away from the type…

Rick Spencer – I’m so starved of the company of other smart creatives that my lizard brain tries to use all it’s tricks to keep them around, or to show my adoration/appreciation. [It's been] at least two years now

Ana Pirri – !

Rick Spencer – Pretty much 90% starved of fellow creators.

Ana Pirri – Well, did it work? oh rick!

Rick Spencer – [One time I did have a sexual relationship with a another creative.]

Ana Pirri – It hurts it hurts!

Rick Spencer – and withdrawing the sex made everything sour.

Ana Pirri – Sure.

Rick Spencer – That’s when you realize that for you, creativity really IS something you need to survive. When your lizard brain turns on the bad behaviors, and emotional conflict, and all those urges and energies to GET it. It’s more powerful than I remember. Anyway, I have to [go], but I thought I would share that with you. Can I ask a favor?

Ana Pirri – Of course

Rick Spencer – I would like to blog this dialogue/monologue. Would you mind if I did, if I anonymized you?

Ana Pirri – Yes – honored.

Rick Spencer – Cool. I’ll give you a rad pseudonym.

Ana Pirri – Excellent

- end

The parts of this exchange that are bracketed are edits with varied degrees of verisimilitude. I have done so to obfuscate experiences that could be embarrassing to others, or simply to enhance readability.

Looking back on this experience I think ‘creatives’ may not have been the right word. Maybe ‘imaginatives’ would have been better. Then again I haven’t been explicitly deprived of imaginitives either. I have known one or two very creative and imaginative people in the last two years, but we certainly met in contexts that were hostile. I know it’s the trendy thing to do but I’m going to quote Teh Mad Menz, “You came here because we do this better than you, and part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are.“

I just finished the Richard Avedon exhibition, and I am out of breath, overwhelmed, Having a religious moment. My heartbeat is up. I feel like I just had a first kiss with the girl I watched all year from across the room. In middle school.

I am rightly humbled, inspired and purged.

I had a Rothko moment earlier. That may have started it.

Does anybody even bother asking why ENOUGH times?

Why is Google on top? Search
Why is search so important? People have questions and search is one way of getting answers? (there are legion other ways, including browse, invention, and non sequitur)
Why are answers so valuable? They are the most rational, comprehensible way of alleviating the emotional anxiety that questions pose. (There are other ways of responding to that anxiety–that curiosity; they include emotional manipulation, distraction, emergence of new questions, irrelevance.)

My point is this. Search is not Googles only weapon. Of equal and possibly greater import is the I feel Lucky option.
The human being is not simply a robot serving only the immediate need for a rational response to a tactical query, but a complex organic milieu of emotion, novelty, irrational exuberance and defiance, and technology, however traditionally rational in its iterative design, is not the last best pattern, but the first pattern made by those very confused and fleshy organisms that work at google. In our lifetime, the simplistic binary nature of computing will seem laughable, and people will be reminded that that binary mathematics it is based on is nearly as old as electricity itself.

Should the designers choose, it is merely a tight left turn, on the order of a decade or less of work, for any person to author that irrational machine, and it is the pattern of humans to appeal to it as they may with all, or other faculties than the rational. We shouldn’t be looking for the next rational predictor, we should be loooking for the pattern maker, the Lakoff+”rapid prototype” that allows us to home construct our own frames, and our own rose colored search/browse/I-feel-lucky result set.

Emotion is hot on the heels of the purely cognitive gen 1 one of the computing experience, exploration, and challege will be next.

Think of google’s ” were you looking for..” suggesting something interesting rather than relevant. Also see “design for debate”, and you’ll understand where I’m coming from.