thethingasitis™
by Michael Atavar (2001)
Launch Project
thethingasitis™ consists of a single web page full of “blue
screen” blue . This is the shade of blue that a video and monitor
display when a signal is sent through the circuit, without image
content. The blue plays at being pure and unmediated. However, this
purity is also undermined by the soft blue text that is animated on
top of it. The text varies, but it generally recounts Atavar’s
personal accounts of using HTML code for color design. Some of the
text includes direct references to HTML color, such as, “html colours
are completely undervalued,” or that these colors should be looked at
“in themselves”—a reference to a kind of metaphysics where “to see,”
and is to know a thing as it is in itself, or, the thingliness of the
thing, that is, its essence. But here, Atavar has intentionally
offset the possibility of accessing an essence. There is no possible
essence for HTML color, as it involves a two-tier process from
hexadecimal code, through its execution as visual content. The
thingliness of the thing reveals that there is no one thing, but
several things, (culture, convention, commercialism) that make the
thingliness of thing appear essential.
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