this is aaronland.info papernet

She has her console and her random access memory. I have my nitwit piece of paper. But I want something to pass between us.

— Don Delillo

Google has facts. Cities have secrets.

— Kevin Slavin

The Internet has rightly been called an "architectures of participation". Paper, though, remains the most succesful and robust architecture of shared histories to date.

The prevailing theory that all human endeavour will sooner or later migrate to the online sphere ignores the physical constraints that continue to bind the digital world; both as a risk factor and a barrier to its use.

More importantly : We like "things" — books, the plastic arts, schwag, otherwise cheap souvenirs that become valued artifacts — because they afford mystery and the room for an object to adapt to the world around them and not the other way around.

If we imagine human language and computers as two equal and opposing forms of magic — never able to fully understand one another — then paper can be seen as a bridge, and the papernet as the API, between the two.

Theory

2009

2008

2007

2006

Practice