[HN Gopher] Doors I touched today (1999)
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       Doors I touched today (1999)
        
       Author : ohaikbai
       Score  : 110 points
       Date   : 2023-03-20 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fluxus.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fluxus.org)
        
       | omershapira wrote:
       | I really wish more people did Fluxus [1] - related art activities
       | in the time of cheap digital media. Its so cheap to document and
       | describe, while still retaining intentionality.
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus
        
       | naillo wrote:
       | Nicholson baker would love this
        
       | blauditore wrote:
       | ...and I thought I was the only one photographing apparently
       | pointless stuff.
       | 
       | I like this.
        
         | acuozzo wrote:
         | When I'm doing home repair and my endoscope isn't handy I use
         | my phone as a periscope.
         | 
         | Because of this it is full of "pointless" photos e.g. dozens of
         | out-of-focus shots behind my AV receiver in my stereo cabinet
         | to make sure I didn't over-strain a cable while pushing it
         | back.
         | 
         | Does this count as pointless stuff?
        
         | all2 wrote:
         | Context? What "pointless stuff" do you photograph?
         | 
         | I'm partial to taking pictures of graffiti, especially on
         | trains. It's like a mobile art gallery with the occasional
         | unskilled swear word thrown in.
        
           | tialaramex wrote:
           | No OP, but I take photographs of infrastructure stuff,
           | especially if I think I might later want to investigate what
           | the deal is. So e.g. I don't have a photograph of the view
           | from the tourist elevator which comes out of a fake chimney
           | on what was Battersea Power Station in Central London
           | (London's electricity was once supplied by huge coal power
           | stations right in the city, today Bankside is a world famous
           | modern art gallery "Tate Modern", while Battersea is
           | basically a mall plus apartments), because you can presumably
           | buy that on a postcard, but I _do_ have a photograph of the
           | interior of a service elevator which accesses that area
           | because I was interested in how it behaved when the idiots
           | running the attraction overloaded that elevator.
        
       | kylecazar wrote:
       | This really reminded me of life before I went remote.
        
       | rdoherty wrote:
       | If you like this, you will love the book The Design of Everyday
       | Things. You will never look at a door the same way again.
       | https://a.co/d/65WzcpJ
        
         | eclipticplane wrote:
         | Instead, you'll learn to get mildly angry every time you come
         | across doors so poorly designed it _must_ be on purpose.
        
       | alex_lav wrote:
       | Kinda makes me sad that I read this, saw the date and then
       | thought "I hope this person is still alive". 24 years is a long
       | time. I quite enjoy content like this, especially the tagline
       | (maybe a definition of a word that I don't know?): Fluxus:
       | "Unfettered play in search of uncharted insights."
        
         | thinkingemote wrote:
         | The author does seem to be alive and well today, has a load of
         | various websites and projects. Also on instagram
         | https://www.instagram.com/allenbukoff/
        
       | isoprophlex wrote:
       | The artist sure loves him some diet coke
        
       | kube-system wrote:
       | It's amazing that pathogens capable of living on surfaces haven't
       | wiped us out already. Thanks immune system.
        
         | throwway120385 wrote:
         | Amazingly brass has antimicrobial properties.
        
           | kube-system wrote:
           | And the only brass knobs he used were in his own home!
        
           | chaxor wrote:
           | And lead, so it's a bit macrobial too :D
        
         | supportengineer wrote:
         | For public doors I use every part of the body _except_ my hands
         | to open and close them.
        
       | wazoox wrote:
       | Fluxus is great. Visit their French museum someday:
       | https://en.fondationdudoute.fr/
        
       | barbs wrote:
       | It's sites like these that make me dearly miss the old internet.
       | 
       | Then I remember that the old internet is mostly still there, just
       | buried under the ad-riddled mass-produced garbage pile of the
       | current internet, and there are ways to dig through to it, but I
       | never do.
        
         | andrei_says_ wrote:
         | Exactly my sentiment.
         | 
         | I'd like to add that I'm grieving the discoverability of all
         | these ingenious self made often a bit unpolished experiences.
         | 
         | Platforms come to provide a shiny space for the makers and then
         | slowly enshittify everything snuffing out the life out of the
         | originals. Just like Disney ;)
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | It's so much harder to find the good parts of the web like this
         | than it used to be that it drains a lot of the fun out of it.
        
           | bmitc wrote:
           | Is there any particular technique anyone uses to find sites
           | like this? About the only way I know of is to happen across a
           | link to them on some forum, like this instance.
        
             | barbs wrote:
             | There's this search engine which seems to show some cool
             | older-style websites:
             | 
             | https://wiby.me/
             | 
             | > _In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily
             | by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about
             | subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the
             | web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded
             | everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden
             | among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn 't great at
             | finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical
             | questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't
             | know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web
             | surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today
             | are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic
             | features in order to mask the lack of content available on
             | them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's
             | web.
             | 
             | The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was
             | in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby
             | helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as
             | pages indexed are more suitable for their performance._
             | 
             | EDIT: I found it via this HN thread that you might find
             | interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31999259
        
         | alphabet9000 wrote:
         | from 2021 https://elliott.computer/residencies/quoin-
         | poeteau/doorknobs...
        
         | cjohnson318 wrote:
         | I clicked around to an old Fluxus Blogger site and I saw a
         | bunch of comments from about 2018 and I thought, "Yay! People
         | are still into Fluxus!" but then I read the comments and
         | realized they were all spam.
         | 
         | I miss the old internet too. It's bigger than ever now, but
         | most of it is garbage.
        
       | klyrs wrote:
       | Does the photographer not flush?!
        
         | kulahan wrote:
         | It's doors, not handles!
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | arduinomancer wrote:
       | This is so weird but cool
       | 
       | Is there a genre of art like this?
       | 
       | That focuses on seemingly mundane stuff?
        
         | frereubu wrote:
         | Not quite so mundane I suppose, but the meticulousness reminds
         | me of Dan Graham's _Homes For America_ :
         | https://www.moma.org/collection/works/105513 It's a detailed
         | description of the pseudo-choice offered to buyers of tract
         | houses in the 1960s.
         | 
         | Edit: And Hans Haacke's _America Is Hard To See_ :
         | https://archive.curbed.com/2015/9/2/9924926/hans-haacke-phot...
        
         | hbn wrote:
         | There's a show I like called How To with John Wilson. It's hard
         | to explain, but it's kind of just a guy digging into a topic
         | each episode, going down rabbit holes of various subcultures
         | and industries, winding up meeting strange people in strange
         | places, and filling a lot in with mundane footage captured in
         | his day-to-day life in New York.
         | 
         | I have trouble giving an elevator pitch for the show, it's
         | better watched than described. But I think "finding the
         | interesting in the mundane" is what makes me enjoy the show so
         | much.
        
       | michaelnoguera wrote:
       | If you like seeing these doors, check out doors _in Antartica_:
       | https://brr.fyi/posts/doors-of-mcmurdo
        
       | hypertexthero wrote:
       | Nice! Reminds me of The Door Problem:
       | https://lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-20 23:00 UTC)