On 29 May 1913 there was a
riot at the Paris Ballet. It was the premier of the Russian
composer Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring. The audience
immediately reacted. Right from the quiet opening bassoon solo, a
number of jeers and boos were heard from the audience, and as the
ballet progressed, the jeering and booing escalated. The audience
were hearing something they had never heard before and reacted
spontaneously. The sound was different from what they were used to,
and the music, the choreography and the scenography were totally
different from what they had expected to hear and see at the Paris
Ballet on that night in May. Stravinsky had created a spontaneous
failure, which provoked fighting in the audience. As a result,
police had to arrive in the interval to restore a reasonable degree
of order. The performance was completed with a certain amount of
riot and disorder in the audience - but there was no doubt that the
new form was making great demands on those in the audience. Later,
psychologists have suggested that the surprising jumps in melody
and the shifting rhythms characterising The Rite of Spring made the
audience feel uneasy, thus making them aggressive, especially as
they did not have the ability to decode the music because it went
beyond their expectations and their past experience with ballets.
Nobody helped them understand what they were hearing and seeing -
and that left them perplexed and angry.
Freedom is what we do with the
limitations we have
In 2008 Americans sent a total of
about 75 billion SMS messages per month. What was originally
intended as a way to use unused resources during time periods with
no traffic on the mobile phone network is now a billion dollar
function that has long since caught on, with all its intrinsic
limitations. When the Finn Matti Makkonen invented the SMS system,
he and his colleagues had to limit the amount of data per message
so that the format could fit into the existing signaling format on
the mobile network. The length of messages was initially limited to
128 bytes and later to 140 bytes - or the equivalent of 160
characters. The first message was, in all its simplicity, "Merry
Christmas" - and since then we have used the 160 characters for a
wide range of human communication. Every day, jokes, marriage
proposals and gossip are flying through the network, aided by the
tools we have invented to work around the limitations to our
communication. But how come a medium with such great limitations is
still so successful - despite the fact that abundance and unlimited
possibilities are the very symbols of our present-day expectations
of both media and life?
This is because limitations can be
man's best friend. Limits make us feel secure but also awaken our
intrinsic creativity. All through history and everywhere in art we
see how limitation has been the starting point and driver for
wilder creativity. From the freaky French-speaking Oulipo group of
writers, poets and mathematicians, who, through restrictions, tried
to invent new ways of writing, and the Japanese haiku poems, which
were written according to stringent rules, to the American writer
Hemingway, who personally found that the best novel he wrote
consisted of six words. Across their fields, artists and inventors
are using limitation as a principal driver of creativity, based on
the philosophy that without limitations we will create nothing new
of any value.
The Power of the
Smiley
From the beginning of his long career,
film director Lars von Trier, who has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes,
among other awards, has used strict self-imposed limitations to
strengthen the creativity of his production. For instance, he made
a film under the selfimposed limitation that he could spend no more
than € 133,333 on its production, and in another film, camera
movements were controlled by a computer. But he is probably best
known as the insistent member of the quartet of film directors
behind the Dogme 95 films, where a large number of international
film directors undertook to abide by ten rules, referred to as "the
Vow of Chastity". For instance, they were not allowed to add sound
or light after filming. The result was more than 200 films from all
over the world that focused on telling their story rather than on
technique. Von Trier learned the technique behind creative
limitations from the hero of his youth, Danish film director and
poet Jørgen Leth, who has used the art of limitation stringently in
his entire production. Von Trier later turned what he had learned
from Leth against him in the film The Five Obstructions, in which
Trier challenged Leth to remake his classic 1967 short film The
Perfect Human. In The Five Obstructions the master is thus
tormented with his own technique by his pupil. If you know the
story behind the films, they are masterpieces. However, von Trier's
films are not easily accessible if you do not know the background;
then the absence of added sound and light will be just a
shortcoming - or the computer-controlled camera movements will be
peculiar, purely and simply.
The same applies to sms messages,
which would not be a very sexy medium if we had not invented an
entirely new form of grammar to superimpose on the basic text
communication. This technique takes its starting point in what we
are dealing with - the letters and other characters available to us
- adding a good deal of human creativity. One of the most important
additions is emoticons, which are now such a well-known and
established aspect of our daily communication that they are taken
for granted. However, the need to express the mood of a message
emerged with our ability to communicate by means of text via a
network where messages were sent in dialogue form but still spoke
to only one of our senses. The limited bandwidth of text
communication forced us to be creative. The post - from 1979 - on a
mailing list is one of the best - and fi rst - examples of
that:
15-Apr-79
12:05:26-PST,1142;000000000000
Mail-from: MIT-MC rcvd at 12-Apr-79
1740-PST
Date: 12 APR 1979 1736-PST From:
MACKENZIE at USC-ECL
Subject: MSGGROUP#1015 METHICS and the
Fast Draw(cont'd)
To: ~drxal-had at OFFICE-1
cc: msggroup at MIT-MC, malasky at
PARC-MAXC
In regard to your message a few days
ago concerning the loss of meaning in this medium: I am new here,
and thus hesitate to comment, but I too have suffered from the lack
of tone, gestures, facial expressions etc.
May I suggest the beginning of a
solution?
Perhaps we could extend the set of
punctuation we use, i.e: If I wish to indicate that a particular
sentence is meant with tongue-in-cheek, I would write it so: "Of
course you know I agree with all the current administration's
policies -)."
The "-)" indicates
tongue-in-cheek.
This idea is not mine, but stolen from
a Reader's Digest article I read long ago on a completely different
subject. I'm sure there are many other, better ways to improve our
punctuation.
Any comments?
Kevin
Without a smiley, you may offend the
receiver - despite the best intentions - with something that was
meant to be friendly. Therefore, we need a set of characters with
which we can express emotions. Kevin macKenzie's suggestion to his
colleagues on the american ARPANET mailing list resulted in a rapid
development - which accompanied the development of digital
communication on the mobile network and the internet for the simple
reason that the meaning of a message is not created by the sender
alone but just as much, or perhaps to an even higher degree, in the
space between the receiver and the message. Students of this field
call it reception theory - research into the meaning we create when
receiving communication. The difficult thing about communication is
not to send a message - but to make sure it is received as
precisely as possible. And that can be difficult as reception takes
the form of decoding in the mind of another human being and is thus
deeply dependent on the sum of his or her life experiences and
cultural background. Therefore, nothing can stand alone if it is to
be understood correctly. And therefore, the audience was unable to
understand the depth of Stravinsky's creativity at the premiere of
his new ballet on that evening in may 1913. It was the first time
they heard and saw it, and nobody helped them understand it. Time
has helped us, and as The Rite of spring has found its place in
history, we have gradually become able to see that it is remarkable
and of lasting value - in fact a work of genius - solely because we
now know the context.
A 160-character
culture
Emoticons make it possible for our
Facebook updates, our tweets and our sms messages to be understood
as intended: a smile may fl icker across the receiver's face - or
he will understand that now we are serious. However, our creativity
goes much further than just combinations of colons, dashes and
bracket signs intended to be viewed with one's head tilted to the
left. Thus, as the trend towards short messages requires us to be
more economical with letters because we are rarely permitted to use
more than 160 characters, we are beginning to develop other ways of
squeezing more and more communication into the cramped space
available. We are beginning to communicate in a more condensed way
rather than at length. The basic question is: why is our use of
short messages growing in an age when the technical limitations
should have been overcome? "In my opinion, where there have been
short message requirements imposed on current media, this has
typically not been driven mainly by technical limitations but has
rather been due to providers' billing models, in the case of sms
messages, or people's shortening attention spans due to the breadth
of entertainment now available, in the case of twitter and other
social networks," says Richard West, the creator of a so-called URL
shortener called is.gd.
A URL shortener makes it possible to
shorten very long web addresses to short strings of characters,
which are better suited for mediaintended for short messages. "URL
shortening services are useful mostly in media that allow only a
limited number of characters, the best example being sms messages.
URLs, which might be deep within a site or dynamically generated,
very often run to 50+ characters, and this simply isn't a good use
of space within an sms message. Another very popular use is in
twitter messages, which have similar restrictions," explains
Richard West, who developed his URL shortener because he was
dissatisfied with the existing options.
The URL shortener is an effective
addition which makes it possible to squeeze much more data into
less space. If, for instance, I wanted to write a twitter message,
where I have only 140 characters available, and wanted to include
the URL of a previous article I wrote for Blink, I would have to
write: http://blink.mediacom.com/new-business-model. By now I would
already have used 44 of the 140 characters available - and there
would not be many characters left for explanatory text. After
visiting is.gd, however, all I would have to write would be:
http://is.gd/6n6Vn, in other words only 18 characters. The link
works just as well as the direct one, and it is the is.gd server
that ensures that anyone who enters the shortened URL is taken to
the original one. So far, is.gd has shortened 100 million links,
and Richard West explains that it will be a long time before they
run out of short URLs: "is.gd's URLs won't become signifi cantly
longer than they are currently.
They'll stay the current length until
just over 916 million shortened URLs have been created, and after
that, adding one additional character will allow over 56 billion
unique shortened URLs, which is far more than is.gd will ever
require." Thus, the future can easily remain short.
Short is good
For a long time, we believed blogs
would become all the rage on the internet. However, they only
caught on among large numbers of the general public when the form
became short and to the point. On the other hand, we quickly
learned that a status update like "Just took the dog for a walk"
will get much fewer comments on Facebook than the update "The dog
just took me for a walk" solely because the latter leaves room for
interpretation in the receiver. Something that can happen in the
encounter between text and receiver - that can shift the experience
from sender to receiver. Creativity flourishes on both sides of the
communication when we encounter a limitation.
New short formats on the
net
If this article has made you feel like
exploring the new short formats on the internet, the natural place
to start is status updates on Facebook or the large number of
messages on twitter - where organisations as diverse as Wal-mart
and NASA communicate their messages and a large number of
celebrities keep in touch with their fan base. You can also see
creativity flourish if you search the web for 6-word novels - a
form inspired by Ernest Hemingway's statement that the best novel
he wrote consisted of just six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never
used" - or if you enter the search string #twitterart in twitter's
search field. One thing is certain: limitations break down all
limits.
The meaning is created in the
mind of the receiver
The Rite of Spring, which Stravinsky
composed in 1913, was so creatively striking that it has gone down
as one of the most important moments in music history - a point in
music history where one could speak of a "before" and an "after".
This surge of creativity sprang in part from the art of limitation.
Stravinsky had composed the whole of the rite of spring without
time signatures and the result was a piece of music which later
became world-famous for its violent and unpredictable rhythms.
Those in the know about classical
music speak of three categories of classical composers: those who
take the past as their starting point and never let go of it, those
who start in the past and move on - and Stravinsky, who started in
the future. But he lacked one important thing at the premiere in
Paris: the ability to convey his music to the audience. Time and,
with it, many other classical experts took care of that - and only
later did we all understand his vision. His music became a success
when somebody who had the necessary experience and was sufficiently
cultured heard it and conveyed it to the rest of us. The music
lacked the punctuation which was necessary in order for it to be
widely understood.