F.A.B.

The key to the creative production of a mass of items is to let the flow of the creation be guided by a chaotic principle the world that is then filled with these items is more likely to be of artistic interest than one which is uniform or limited to a finite number of shapes. Imagine a beautiful english landscape. Now picture that landscape if it consisted solely of the shapes from the game Tetris, laid out to resemble that landscape.

Now I can’t wait for fabbers to be in general circulation. Fabbers are devices that can create things from a set of instructions. It is the future of western commericial society. You have a fabber unit at home. You download a set of instuctions to create an object. It gives you a shopping list of raw materials. You feed them into the fabber, it then creates the object.

At first, these objects will be very simple, like tetris blocks. I would imagine that, for instance, to create a fairly flat plastic fork would not take too vast a set of instructions. But for more complex items, it could take a lot longer before we get to that stage.

Also feeding into this are the problems of Intellectual Property. Is it moral to claim IP rights on the design of a plastic fork? Whilst people will claim rights, there will also be a whole structure and language there to allow people to create, for themselves, a massive variety of objects. I’d like to make a wind up radio with fork patterns all over it, coloured to just the right tone to fit in with my living room. Whom should I pay for coming up with that idea? Why should I pay for coming up with that idea?

In times gone past, if enough people wanted my wind-up radio with fork prints the colour of my living room, it would have gone into mass-production. In the 50-60’s, this item might have been made in a factory in my country by relatively poor people. Whilst making my faddish radio may not have been the realisation of all their life dreams, the nationwide desire for my radio may have helped to feed and clothe them. In the present day, the radio may well be made in an impoverished third-world country. In this country the people may have no desire to even listen to my twisted creation, but again, the meagre pennies they get for constructing it may be a difference between life and starvation for them.

Now, if I make this item in the comfort of my nicely co-ordinated living room, what happens to the person who in years gone past would have made it? they can’t afford a fabber themselves. Hmmmmmm.