Pleasant imperfections

I juxtapose two quotations. One seems to comment on the other.

Roland Barthes in the preface to Sade / Fourier / Loyola reaffirms for us (in case we forgot) that "The text is an object of pleasure."

Chapter 4 "Perfection" from David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined contains the following observation:

The imperfection of the Web isn't a temporary lapse; it's a design decision. It flows directly from the fact that the Web is unmanaged and uncontrolled so that it can grow rapidly and host innovations of every sort. the designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose.

Local perfections and global pleasure. There is a certain type of pleasure that delights in exploring and tracing out "imperfection". For imperfection read materiality.

This fascination with the pleasures of materiality of course can be applied to the rhetoric of multimedia. To compose with graceful degradation in mind. These are the values of wabi sabi.


And so for day 114
07.04.2007