![\"Silent](\"pic\/tekorange.jpg\")
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File this one in the “What-goes-round-comes-round” category. Via Josh Spear’s blog<\/a> I came across an entry that took me to an interesting bit of indy product: Silent Revolution<\/a>‘s clothing accessories for the hyper-connected cyberculture. The idea behind this start-up being “an effort to create futuristic, minimal bags and clothing reflective of the digital age in which we live.<\/em>” Okay. But what struck me was how un-cyber<\/em> these things seemed to me. They didn’t look to me like “minimal, sophisticated, cyber-influenced<\/em>” bags. They’re nice, but they looked a bit like something else.<\/p>\n What got me in particular was the use of the term “cyber-influenced”. For me the look of all things cyber will probably forever be visually linked to the cover of William Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome<\/a> (the book I owned back in ’88 consisted of only the graphic shown on the new one – no white border and no blown-out hype). That was the look of cyberspace in the mid-80’s when Apple computers were changing the print world with desktop publishing and dot-matrix printouts, frogdesign was designing “Snow White” computer housings for their gear, and videogames were still mostly colorful coin-op machines at arcades that assaulted your auditory system the minute you stepped within earshot. It wasn’t the clean, sophisticated computer-aesthetic of Syd Mead’s earlier Tron<\/a> work. Nope. The word “cyber” instead evoked the famous first line from Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer<\/a>, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel<\/em>.” Cyber has always been a street term – people remixing technology to their own purpose and sometimes even merging with it. For me it’s always sounded dirty and looked noisy. It’s even now slang for virtual sex.<\/p>\n So what do I see when I look at these bags? Interestingly enough, I see pre-cyberspace<\/em>. I see clean retro computer aesthetics. Stuff from the 70’s. Looking at these designs reminds me of the days when I was coding Fortran, hole-punching cards and sticking them into a card reader to run my program. Is that cyber? I don’t know. Not to me it isn’t. Maybe we need a new description for this aesthetic; a look which I have to admit I see elsewhere. How about PreCyber Retro? We could use another label before everything gets swallowed up into the singularity soup.<\/p>\n {Image source: Silent Revolution}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" File this one in the “What-goes-round-comes-round” category. Via Josh Spear’s blog I came across an entry that took me to an interesting bit of indy product: Silent Revolution‘s clothing accessories for the hyper-connected cyberculture. The idea behind this start-up being … Continue reading