Randomized Garfield comic #12323 using Censored template, inspired by @CensoredGarf pic.twitter.com/bhxehVAEW3

— Garfield Randomized (@RandomizedGarf) December 22, 2020

pic.twitter.com/d0xId6tb5j

— pipe garfield (@GarfieldPipe) February 2, 2021

I really enjoyed this thoughtful (and gentle) analysis (NYT, Archive.is) of Garfield, brands, culture, consistency, and nostalgia. Despite the proliferation of arch/snark Garfield remixes, the author considers them authentically.

Little did I know that iteration would become the dominant model of 21st-century entertainment: beloved intellectual property endlessly spun off, rebooted and crossed over; culture not as a series of works but as a constellation of reliable draws. It is true that I am getting older, but it is also true that culture can get worse: less surprising, more reliant on references and brands, familiar to the point of revulsion. I worry that I have witnessed these changes in my short lifetime, although I cannot really know. As a hedge against uncertainty, Garfield variants offer a course of conditioning.

I’m intrigued by a few examples I’ve come across lately that downgrade (to an interesting effect) the visual to the textual.

On Twitter, two feeds that take image-specific services and simply describe them in a few words.

• PicturelessPinterest offers “The best of Pinterest without having to look at the pictures.” (sample tweets: Overexposed picture of a bride walking through a white hallway; A recipe for rhubarb-lemon curd yogurt; Dining room table set up on a beach)
• Text-Only Instagram is “Your personal Instagram feed in a lightweight text format.” (sample tweets: Tilt-shift fortune cookie; Latte with foam shaped like a heart; Four self-portraits of a teenage girl separated by white lines.)

Descriptive Camera is a camera that captures an image and then obtains a typed description of the contents. Example: Looks like a cupboard which is ugly and old having name plates on it with a study lamp attached to it.

After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still “developing” in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a polaroid print.

I love people hacking together some bit of technology (or a technology-enabled experience) to drive just a bit of reflection on what we might take for granted.

Bonus deconstruction: garfield minus garfield