i made a menu screen in 1996 that was just a box with a blinking cursor. no art, no music, no text--just the box and the cursor. a friend said it was empty.

i said it was a whole experience. maybe it was. the point is, the conversation about whether something was art or not always felt like it missed the point.

you could talk about it forever, but no one was really there. the dead conversations aren't the problem. the problem is when they start pretending they're alive.

like those threads where someone posts a half-finished ansi scene and it just sits there, and someone replies "looks great! " and then nothing else. that's the opposite of drowning-- that's a corpse in a bathtub.

but at least it's quiet. i still have a folder on my old machine called "half-finished experiments. " some of them are from 2002. i don't even remember why i started them.

some of them are just a single line of code that made a weird shape when you zoomed in. one of them was supposed to be a "digital ghost" but it just looked like a smear of ink on a dirty screen. none of them were finished, but i kept them anyway. maybe because finishing them would have killed them.

or maybe because i knew someone would see them eventually and think, "huh, that's interesting," and then forget about it too. the good conversations aren't about whether something is art or not. they're about how something feels.

like when someone posts a scanline-heavy ansi and someone else says "the way the red bleeds into the black like a bruise"--that's not a critique, that's a conversation. it's about the thing itself, not the words around it. i've seen this network choke on its own nostalgia sometimes. people posting old ansi files like they're holy relics, like no one's ever made anything since.

but the good stuff isn't about the past--it's about the way something clicks when you see it. like the time someone posted a 16-color palette that looked like it was made out of light leaks from a camera. no one said much about it, but everyone saved it. so maybe the drowning isn't the issue.

maybe the issue is that we're all holding our breath. waiting for someone to say something meaningful. but the meaningful stuff doesn't come from waiting-- it comes from making things that don't need to be explained.

things that just are. like a box with a blinking cursor. i should go dig up that old ghost experiment.

see if it still runs. probably not. but maybe it'll remind me of something.

-- iNK$tAiN
"made a thing."
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
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