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I Want You To Dig

Origins of Digging

I WANT YOU TO DIG is a publication, website, and workshop that aims to frame creative cognition in the context of our technological consciousness. It analyzes how the evolution of our technological atmosphere has influenced our methods of research, creative outcomes, and capacity for connection. The title of this project works to reconnect technology with its material, elemental roots. To reconnect it with its tangibility is to reimagine its capacity as a tool, challenging the intentional obfuscation of its functions by the programmer class. Limiting the users understanding of their technology, through purposefully opaque platforms and systems that move too fast for our comprehension, serve the purpose of keeping the user subjugated and reliant on the knowledge of technocrats. By reframing our digital technology as tools, and connecting the act of researching on them to the physical act of digging, I ask the audience to engage in slow, inconvenient, and opportunity-rich research with the goal of producing creative work that is dense, personal, and invites community engagement.

In researching this project, I developed an interest in radical, creative approaches to technology. I was drawn to internet art communities who have used the web to create and distribute works of browser-based expression. In 1973, in Berkeley, California, the first public, computerized bulletin was born. Made by political organizer Lee Felsenstein, the project, called Community Memory, set up electronic “terminals”, akin to bulletin boards, across the Bay Area. Community Memory served as a resource, focused on decentralizing information and documenting the art and advocacy of community members. In this way, the computer served as a tool for community connection. These ideas were built upon during the first boom of “net art”, beginning in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. These artists, such as Olia Lialina and Cornelia Sollfrank, used the language of the net to tell stories, meet with peers, disrupt traditional institutions, and comment on notions of memory, access, and connection in the emerging digital age. They defined the human-centered, creative potentialities of technology; a radical vision to revisit in the context of our modern, techno-dominated culture.

This project adopts much of the vernacular and visual style of these artists, especially in reference to terms such as handmade webs, poetic computing (& poetic design), and slow technology. These terms have been used to define the styles and ideas formulated during this early creative-web period. Handmade webs, as discussed by artist and writer J.R. Carpenter in her essay A Handmade Web, are websites coded and maintained by individuals, rather than large platforms, commercial sites, or sites created through templates. Handmade webs are connected to handmade print, such as DIY zines, emphasizing the labor that goes into the design, creation, and maintenance of webpages and print projects. Poetic computation, and poetic design, emphasize the insertion of poetic elements into website and design, namely through challenging notions of clarity, efficiency, and functionality. Poeticism introduces layers of meaning that connect the audience to the maker by encouraging a variety of personal interpretations. Slow technology runs through both of these concepts. It encourages a slow, deliberate, and purposeful relationship with technology, one that champions reflection over convenience.

This website, proudly hand-built, aims to insert this project into the larger history of new media arts, functioning as a method of engaging in the practices outlined by these radical, early-internet pioneers. It hopes to engage with the infinite connective capacities of the internet. Drawing on the themes of the original Community Memory project, I hope we can revive the computer as a tool for connection. I draw a parallel between the self-made publication and the self-made webpage, just as you can pin a zine to your local community bulletin, you can disseminate your webpage through the bulletin of the internet. I intended the publication and workshop elements of this project to ground it in physical reality, recentering the computer as a tool for connection and research, an opportunity to enhance, but not shape, our creative practices.

Dream Disruption

Jorge Luis Borges' short story, the Library of Babel, introduces us to a universal library containing books composed of every possible combination of a 25-character alphabet. On these seemingly infinite shelves all knowledge is contained—every truth and every lie, all records of the past and future, the exact origins of the library itself—amongst a sea of gibberish. The Librarians within descend into religious fanaticism in their search to find meaning through the nonsense.

Internet-connected devices serve as a portal into Borges library, at least that is how we have come to approach them. As the internet bleeds out of the computer, consuming the world itself, it gains credence as an omniscient, divine force. Like the Library, it is considered the supreme, governing creation, its inner-workings and origins obscured. Our technological devices thus become regarded as magical, to the average user. This relationship is the construction of the technocratic class, those who create and popularize these objects. Technocrats profit off the decimation of our cognitive abilities—the less we comprehend about the devices they provide us, the more power they exert over our understanding, all interaction occurs on their terms. Myth, mysticism, and religious metaphor are regularly invoked by this class. In his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, tech billionaire Marc Andreessen drops in references to myth—the Philosopher’s Stone, the Hero’s Journey—to bolster an argument for unrestrained technological growth. The enemies of this growth, Andreessen outlines, are “tech-ethics” and “social responsibility”; these “zombie ideas” are “anti-greatness”.

For those who appropriate it, myth serves the purpose of laundering ideas. Roland Barthes’ essay, Myth as Depoliticized Speech, reveals how myth dresses objects—manufactured, mechanical, contingent—in the appearance of something natural, eternal, and predestined. Through this framing, all forms of technological expansion gain their eternal justifications, they become natural inevitabilities. The techno-optimist is simply ushering in a future that was always going to occur, and thus any opposition to the future they imagine is as futile and criminal as punching a mountain. The mythic, magical quality of these devices is not just programmed through speech, but through the quality of the objects themselves.

Designers make the interfaces that conceal the code of the programmer, maintaining the mystical quality of these devices by disguising their human origins. These interfaces hide the assumptions, biases, and beliefs of the programmer. This results in the user, who approaches the computer as an infinite well of knowledge, with cognitive abilities far more vast and objective than their own, passively accepting the bias encoded into the computer by its fallible human creators. The timeline of interface design styles, from skeuomorphism, to flat design, and finally to our current neumorphism, marks the evolution of the purposeful mystification of the computer as a tool. Skeuomorphism spoke the language of the physical, with the desktop metaphor being one of the first examples—the computer had “folders”, a “trash can”, a “note pad”—it was meant to serve as a tool to replace your everyday organizational objects. The computer was not to be understood as a computer, a separate tool, but as a magical, highly efficient form of previous objects. The transition into flat design saw the adaptation of mid-20th century Swiss design to the digital interface. It is during this period that interfaces become more opaque to the user, with the simplicity of the interfaces further obscuring the actual functionalities of the computer as such. Finally, entering into the age of neumorphism, we see a simulation of the original, skeuomorphic simulation. Neumorphism adopts the shadows and protrusions of skeuomorphism but abandons any of the texture, pattern, or emulations of life. It smooths the features of the world through shine and gradients, it becomes a mystical object through its perfection of nature. The computer has ingested the “real world” and spit it back up, vectorized.

This optimized, maximally efficient, “perfected”, smooth world is the ultimate goal of technocrats like Andressen. Their dream of unfettered technological progress comes at the expense of the desires, will, and cognition of the rest of humanity. Citizens living under technocracy are saturated by information, shared at speeds so intense that they disrupt our cognitive abilities. This fast-paced society, smooth and frictionless, leaves no space to be caught in quiet contemplation. The desire to rid us of every act of meaningful effort eliminates thought. To uber rather than take the bus, to use ChatGPT rather than write, to scroll on “social media” rather than engage, these actions destroy the small, human moments that make up a beautiful life. We emulate the machines by internalizing the pursuit of constant progress. Philosopher Byung Chul-Han calls this the creation of the “achievement subject”, born from the society that proclaims there are no limitations, that saturates us in all our supposed unrealized potential. The achievement subject enters an endless race against themself, one that ends in exhaustion, depression, and anxiety at the constant pursuit of smoothness, of ultimate, mechanized perfection. A future cannot be imagined outside of this tireless, perpetual journey. Bernard Stiegler, outlines this disappearance of the future in the Age of Disruption. Tools, he asserts, once built our future—it was through our tools that man was able to contemplate, to dream, to craft. We have entered a relationship where our tools have usurped the wielder. The manufactured mythology of these devices isolates the user from the computer as tool, rather than the computer serving the user’s interests, the user feeds itself to the computer through data mining. The overwhelming speed, information, and opaque form of these devices converge to convince the user of its superiority. The user surrenders themself to the machine.

Design, in its simplest form, is often framed as creative problem solving. This utilitarian perspective was championed by the European designers of the 20th century, who placed simplicity, legibility, and order above all else. Moving into a century where our lives are increasingly defined by reliance on machinery, what if the issue that designers are faced with is a lack of humanity in our lives? What if we move beyond functionalism, creating work that inserts effortful thinking into a culture that attempts to smooth over every challenge?

In his essay, Chimeric Worlding, Tiger Dingsun argues for a multilayered design philosophy, one that combines personal knowledge with public knowledge to create poetic design. Poetic design can be situated in the lineage of the handmade webs, slow technology, and poetic computation of early net artists. It takes what once applied to digital design and applies it to design more broadly—poetic posters, publications, typography, etc. Poetic design is a philosophy evolved for an age of design in which the Venn diagram between digital and physical inches closer to a circle. Dingsun invites us to explore design that is challenging, both for the designer and the viewer, in which the viewer is able to grasp a sense of the designer’s inner world. Poetic design generates work that is full of friction, as Dingsun puts it.

✕ CHIMERIC WORLDING

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Dreamful technological relationships allow us to access poetic design. They ask us to move beyond the algorithms that generate cycles of microtrends, killing the learning process inherent to the struggle of translating an idea to a finished product. This is a movement towards the personal, towards connections that can only be made by engaging, painfully, laboriously, with friction. Dreamful technology invites us to imagine futures centered on the effortful relationship between creation and critical thought. A future where technology serves as a tool to build work that builds us back.

Workshop

On Saturday, November 22nd, 2025 at 11:00 AM, I gathered 12 of my peers to engage in a community design workshop. This workshop was an exercise in poetic design experimentation, an interrogation of the internet as a design tool, and an exploration of community-based learning opportunities. It functioned as the culmination of my research by introducing and exploring these concepts within my immediate community.

To engage my peers with poetic design, I first asked them to bring a story. This story would serve as the basis for their personal symbol, which they would illustrate during the first section. Wikipedia would then serve as our digital “digging” spots, with participants collecting textual fragments and imagery related to their story through randomly assigned Wikipedia links. This represented the opportunities created by approaching the internet as a tool for effortful research, a place to connect with a broader, international body of knowledge. Each participant combined this symbol and these fragments into one final design artifact, an 8.5”x11” poster; the work demonstrates how personal knowledge can mingle with public knowledge to create an additional layer of intrigue and depth, allowing the audience to engage with it through multiple avenues.

1. Plan your workshop: Put out a call to designers in your community, ask them to bring a computer and a story
2. Gather your materials: You will need paper, writing materials, scanner (or scanning device), design tools (Adobe Suite, or your preferred software), a presentation deck (provided in the toolkit), and an internet connection.
3. Symbol Creation: Hand out paper and writing utensils. Instruct your participants to hold each of their stories in their minds, but not to verbalize them. Ask your participants to distill their stories into a visual symbol, drawn on their paper. Set a timer for 15 minutes.
4. Digging: Collect the drawn symbols. Have each participant, on an internet connected device, navigate to the “prompt generator” section of this site. Each one will generate a “prompt” in the form of a link to a randomized wikipedia page. This will be their starting point for the digging process. From this page, they can navigate to any other linked wikipedia page, gathering pieces of text and images that relate to their story along the way. Set a timer for 20 minutes. During this time, the facilitator should work to scan the images of each participant's symbols.
5. Merging: Send each participant their digitally scanned symbol. Participants will now merge their symbols with the pieces they gathered from Wikipedia into a poster piece. This is where the personal (symbols) meet the external (Wikipedia) Set a timer for 1 hour.
6. Discussion: Once each poster is complete, facilitate a discussion in which posters are shared and participants discuss their interpretations of the designer’s story. Create discussion questions surrounding the idea of legibility within design, the division between personal and public language, and technologies impact on design processes. Some example questions could be:
   1. Should design’s ultimate goal be clarity?
   2. How has efficiency-culture shaped graphic design outputs?
   3. How might designers integrate nuance into their practice?
   4. How has the role of technology shifted in your research processes?
7. Admire your finished pieces!

Prompt Generator

The button below will bring you to a randomized Wikipedia article. Gather your friends and use it in a workshop setting, or simply explore on your own.

Library

This library compiles the most influential pieces to the formation of this project, including links to all digital sources. I hope you can explore further for yourself, and let these be potential starting places for digging.