Image source: Ze Frank’s Ugly MySpace competition finalist.
People find ways to cope with fluidity.
It’s not always pretty, and here is another way the coping and repersonalisation of space manifests: Ugliness.
This is when you can’t use where you are to define who you are (because of course there is no where you are on the Web… or at least not much of one. Sites are all a search query and a click away). Or indeed, when you can use where you are to attract certain people (people into the same band as you) and drive other people away (parents).
The example here is MySpace, site where where millions of kids fill a space with their own pictures, videos, comments and so on, and hang out with each other. But the spaces are templated. How do they display their ownership of it?
Ze Frank, who runs a popular video blog called The Show, had a competition to create or find the ugliest MySpace page.
But he wasn’t doing it to the take the mick. He was reclaiming ugly as a term of design.
I want to read exactly what he said on the topic. From the Ze Frank’s The Show transcript, 14 July 2006:
“For a very long time, taste and artistic training have been things that only a small number of people have been able to develop. Only a few people could afford to participate in the production of many types of media. Raw materials like pigments were expensive; same with tools like printing presses; even as late as 1963 it cost Charles Peignot over $600,000 to create and cut a single font family.
“The small number of people who had access to these tools and resources created rules about what was good taste or bad taste.
“Over the last 20 years, however, the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted. Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! […]
“As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, they don’t necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers.
“In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that “work” in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.”
Yeah!