37: loading as an art form

Growing up, I would come home from class and diligently watch TRL (Total Request Live, a MTV show that did a countdown of the top 10 most requested music videos every day). I would see if there were any new songs that I wanted to listen to, and then wrote it down on a sheet of paper. Then, every weekend I would bring my iPod Nano and the sheet with my songs, and bike to my friend's house. There, the magic of LimeWire came alive. While I was stuck on dial-up internet, my friend had high-speed internet, and with it, the capability to use LimeWire to download any song I wanted. Eventually, TRL got canceled, we got high speed internet at home, and this ritual ended.

While modern convenience seems hard to beat, something is lost when the whole journey of the process has turned instantaneous. Streaming music can put any song right at my fingertips almost immediately, but it can not replicate the excitement of sitting with a new ear-worm throughout the week, or the social element of borrowing a friend's computer, or the triumphant feeling of an iPod fully loaded with some new tracks. The forward march of technological progress rarely considers what it tramples in its path.

Similarly, back in the dial-up days, there was plenty of anticipation and annoyance clicking on a website link and watching as the new web page slowly come to life, a few lines at a time. The stakes for clicking a link felt higher, I didn't want to misclick or else it would just be wasted time watching a new web page I didn't want to see load. Watching something load felt annoying for the most part, and this isn't an attempt to romanticize it, but rather, noticing that losing that period of time is still a loss. In an era in which rapidly constructed data centers are reminders that the virtual still has a physical costs, the slower row by row appearance of loaded media provide an almost tactile reminder of the physicality that is still present with virtual goods.

With this tiny.site, we've intentionally set up an experience of loading. It's faked by just using 10 different cropped images, and then having a timer that loads them in one at a time, to give the illusion of a loading image. It's a reminder that some things are worth the wait.

My journey in documenting projects, ideas, collaborations, creative sketches, and more can be found at a flower is not a flower.

tiny.sites is a collection of small websites exploring the different possibilities of the web.