The Abstract Machine is now a blog (amongst other things).
Why a blog, when you’ve been preaching singular tools for so long? Isn’t that too generic?
I’ve actually been interested for quite some time in the idea that html would slowly turn into a specialist medium, with most of the general public using pre-programmed objects such as forums, blogs, wikis, or spips. What I didn’t know when I started entertaining this idea (right about the time Ragnar was building the Webwaste) was that everyone would make the jump. As things are going, it looks as if pretty soon most artists — even those who build net works — will just have something like a blog, rather than some endlessly re-tooled website. At least this is what I’ve been preaching to the students, despite the fact that I have a pretty in-depth html/php class going on right now. Or maybe I tell them that because they have such sloppy websites and I hope the pre-fab blogs will chase away all the layers and 1,000,000 pixel-wide Flash interfaces.
So where’s the infamous thesis website?
It’s on its way. It’ll either de-throne this blog as the frontpage, or simply be linked to it in some way or the other. The nice thing about the blog its unstable nature. So it’s good as a landing point. The thesis is more settled, and also infinitely more complex to build/populate.
What did you build it with?
Wordpress and lots of books on CSS. I still don’t like the CSS, but what the hell : you’ve gotta publish sometime or another.