S P A C E | HCMC, 'Computer Says No'
The lead story for this issue is 'TRS80.'
It is an excerpt from Dipika Kohli's next eBook, 'Reality & Trust'.
What is this about?
Dipika Kohli writes this introduction....
I remember this. GIGO. 'Garbage In, Garbage Out.' Bullshit in, bullshit out. Guess what kind of world we are living in, in 2020? You just don't know what's what, right? The computer programmers had this term for that exact phenomenon.
According to Wikipedia's entry on 'garbage in, garbage out'... 'In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is the concept that flawed, or nonsense input data produces nonsense output or "garbage". Sometimes the term rubbish in, rubbish out (RIRO) is used. The principle also applies more generally to all analysis and logic, in that arguments are unsound if their premises are flawed.... The first use of the phrase has been dated to a November 10, 1957, syndicated newspaper article about... mathematicians and their work with early computers, in which... William D. Mellin explained that computers cannot think for themselves, and that "sloppily programmed" inputs inevitably lead to incorrect outputs.' Read the full Wikipedia entry here.
GIGO. Like RTFM for programmers, this was this phrase that many an engineer I knew in my late-night study hours joking around and getting more and more ridiculous would bandy about. Yeah. Four years of studying engineering, in university, and graduating only to quit the field, after two bizarre gigs full of.... garbage. Corporate architecture. Enough said. But yeah. GIGO. More relevant today than ever, I feel. This title came to me this month, because well, so much BS exists and is touted as 'intersting' when it's a listicle, or a 'new look for my makeup', or some dumb movie or worse, a made-for-television movie, or some other drag that is getting the way of inputting that which is, well, savory. Intriguing. Good for us.
This is what I think. If information is like food, bad information is giving us indigestion.' What's the first step to remedying this? I've put the theory into this issue of S P A C E. It's called S P A C E | HCMC, 'Computer Says No.' I got the idea of compiling stuff for this issue out of what I find online and through odd exchanges on email that seems to be more and more of the kind of uncooked and under informed soup of not just boring, but weird, and often, um, well. I'll just say. I've been receiving myriad bizarre emails from points of space around the world that seemed to indicate a general, global mental malaise. An inkling about why this is bad, why this is bad, surfaced this week from my memory banks. From there, a synapse. And then: clack!, the brain whirred up a half-century old, but highly relevant to contemporary life, phrase: 'Garbage In, Garbage Out.'
Why? Because of junk. So, so much. Streams. Feeds. Bollix, a lot of it. Designed to make you click and buy something you don't even need. You know that. But you click and buy anyway. WHY. I've done this. I'm susceptible to the same things. I remember buying [deleted] and wondering how on earth, later, I had justified that, when it would have sustained me for four months in Vietnam. Lol.
Trends, instapopularity, overwhelming specialization of the self, and other unsatisfying-to-a-quality-seeking-human streams of nothingness are populating our day to day.
In this everyday stream of bullshit, what's for real?
Art should make the comfortable disturbed, and the disturbed comfortable.
The inquiry for my next book, 'Reality & Trust' departs, from here.
About Dipika Kohli
Dipika Kohli's written and visual work, as well as curations, juxtapose people, place, and found imagery in 'minitheaters' as well as digital 'zines' like S P A C E. She engages with media at hand, wherever she is, to build something out of what's available in that moment, with that feeling. A bricolage artist at heart, she thus invites the new to enter any frame: when mixed, there is invitation for those who are participant to connect, reconnect, and revisit their idea of such fixed thinking as 'this is where this is taking us' and 'here is what we know.' Do we know anything, for sure? Ask the quantum physicists. Ask N. Bohr: 'How wonderful that we have met with a paradox; now we have some hope of making progress.'
You'll get