Tag Archives: web page

Untitled painting 2

By Paul | Published: April 25, 2010

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Ritual

By Paul | Published: November 7, 2009

Turn on the computer yourself. Turn it on from a complete shutdown, not a restart from standby or hibernation. It is important that you journey with the computer from an offline state. This allows for complete synchronization and determines your rhythm. It gives you ownership. Start a new session on your browser, do not restore. If you have saved tabs, close them. Your browser’s homepage should be the only thing you are welcomed with. Think of this as the trunk of a tree. Everything you do from now on will branch from here.

Observe each webpage in its entirety and do not read in an F-shaped pattern. If you must skim, do so in a figure of 8. Do not run an ad blocker. Ads are an important part of the page, they provide a context and are an important decoration. They tell you as much about the content as reading does. Investigate every link; hover over them and look to the bottom left of your screen for their destination. Remember the url’s. Absorb them. A naked url reveals more than its anchor text; it provides an abstract of the forthcoming page. Investigate every link, but don’t follow every link. Following every link is a distraction, it prevents you from building up momentum. Momentum is important. Surfing is about decision making, decisions are best made with momentum.

Do not repeat old or memorised searches. If you are stuck, take your time; reflect. Search within yourself first and the search engine second. Enjoy this moment. Have no destination in mind, only a place to start, you will soon forget your initial curiosity and be invigorated instead by its offspring. There is no destination, only a series of resting places. Record these.

Weight all results from a search engine equally. Ignore all rankings, imagine the results are displayed randomly. The results on the 17th page are just as important as those on the 1st. Search engines do not provide you with what you are looking for, at best they are springboards. As you progress through the pages so does the disconnect from your original search term; you are looking for the disconnect. The disconnect is where you are consumed by someone else’s interpretation of what you originally meant when you started your search. What you meant when you started your search is no longer important. Investigate image searches as thoroughly as web ones; the disconnect happens sooner. Links laid out in “hand crafted” pages however are immeasurably more valuable than those found in a search engine. Follow these with more vigour. Anyone who has laid out a links page or hyperlinked text from their article has done so lovingly and knowingly. These links come readily endorsed, researched and verified. Respect this. They will take you to places you couldn’t get to on your own. Enjoy broken links and embrace holding pages, examine these with the same intensity as you would any page. They are wonderfully lost souls that can’t be found through searching alone. There are no dead-ends on the web, but they are as close as you will come.

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Obey – an hypnotic apparition

By Paul | Published: July 25, 2009

kimsdiet_obey_160x600_060109A banner ad that follows me around the internet, subliminally hypnotising me with its artifice.

How it knows where to find me, I’m not sure. How it knows why to find me, I’m even less so. I am far from its target demographic. But lurking in a 160×600 box on the right hand side of innumerable web pages, it always does. Sandwiched between an anonymous quote with its instruction highlighted in red against browser default, hyper-link blue and a series of news network badges that act as authenticators of fact, shifting the subjective into the objective, are two portraits of the same woman; one before, one after. It is these pictures and their persistence in reaching so many web pages before me and not the command they follow that I realise hypnotise me most.

Perhaps, as a male, I am more easily drawn to the breasts framed in the same red as the instruction at top to obey. Perhaps it is the instruction to obey in the same red as the bikini top in the “after” picture – the result of my subservience to its command – that draws me to them. But it is not this. This I realise is a distraction. This is not the thing here that is hypnotising me. This is so obvious a tactic that it can no longer be acknowledged as artifice.

No, the thing that I realise that hypnotises me here are not the breasts – their exposure after as opposed to their covering before and, by implication the confidence gained by obeying – but the face.

I am drawn first by the eyes. I notice how dark they are. I notice this independently of their contrast against the whiteness of the smile. I expect a white smile and I am blind to it. The darkness of the eyes is much more noticeable against the pale pastel colouring of the rest of the photo in any case. It is this contrast that creates the optical vacuum that begins to hypnotise me. I look in to them.

I begin to see both sets of eyes at once – stereoscopically. They are on a separate plain to the rest of the image. They hover above the face. As I look into them, they slowly begin to pull the rest of the face forward. Both images, the before and the after are now in three parts; the eyes, the face and the body in descending order. Disembodied like this, I realise what it is that hypnotises me about this image. It is the same face in both pictures. Not the same person, the same face and then not of the same person as the body. In each instance the face has been superimposed, mirrored, tilted and correctly toned. It is the same image in facsimile to represent the same person, a different person, in two different states of being. One person before and one person after. Two different people and no discernable differentiation in time. Three people to create the perfect doppelganger. Obey.

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