Today I ran into the Souvenirs From The Internet project and it’s awesome facebook pillows and internet commemorative plates.
There is a certain delight in the macabre nature of these objects…having a plate celebrating viral videos or the shitty buildings that house mega-internet companies is insane and hilarious. But the desire is a real movement, I think…the timeline on facebook is a new way to take this stream of data (relentless and flowing) and make it into an object – my timeline has a beginning (my birth) and a growing end (the present time).
Apps like Social Memories take facebook detritus and turns it into gold – infographics, photos and posts immortalized in a book form…Seeing one in person is amazing. And it takes very little effort to do. A friend of mine did this the hard way – taking a year of conversations and stories and notes and turning it into a 400 page book of amazement.
On the flip side is the Cloud printer from Berg..it can keep up with the daily detritus and attempts to make it more tanigible…if not permanent and memorable.
So…on the Buildable-Desirable-Profitable Venn space…the plates are the most awesome to me, since they are desirable…but not very buildable. In their current form they are hand painted and craft-y…which is what makes them delightful. The books, pillows…they are similar in some ways to the Berg printer…but they are static and timeless…they preserve something. They are nostalgic in the way they freeze electronic memories in atom form. The Printer is a very conventional product in that way – focused on the now, on desire, on moving forward.
What’s next?
