What is IANGAC? It’s a fictional HyperCard stack that is an example of one person in relative isolation trying to map their own internal “memex” - their own Xanadu of ideas that are probably wrong or inaccurate in all kinds of ways, that even when they are right they are so particular and limited and conjoined to all sorts of other unrelated things. It is meant to shine a light on how we think - and what’s more - how we delude ourselves into believing we think more clearly and singularly than we really do. It also, I think, tries to offer some pointers to how to engage in a culture that is in the dip of rhetoric and humanistic ideas and has lost faith (for a time) in the institutions of demonstration and rigorous logic.

How do you explain a non-linear text? How do you lead someone through a series of ideas that aren’t in sequence, but instead layer on each other or repeat or link? There are a lot of questions like that in what I have been calling “I Am Not Good at Computer” (a reference to a meme about a joke mis-printed advertisement and the Fenslerfilm GI Joe parodies). This project started out in the aftermath of the sprawling doyouwanttofeelsomething.com exploration of Windows 95 and mid-90’s Windows aesthetic GUI stuff. That project could not be explained in text. I figured so long as I was into retro stuff that I knew as a child, why not start exploring the world I wasn’t a part of: vintage Macintosh. What was there? I was willing to let what was there show me what I should try to make.

What I found was that early Macintosh - “a bicycle for your mind” - felt much less businesslike than Windows. It was not an attempt to create a featureless digital desktop for you to do work at: it was its own creative expression that Susan Kare and Jobs (of course) and Bill Atkinson et al created to show you how they imagined you could use computers at home. Exploring all the old software in emulation form showed what an interesting aesthetic experience it was: black and white, creative graphics and interaction. When I was a kid all the smart computer-savvy types considered Macintosh computers the equivalent of Playskool toys: not for the serious coder. What I found in the programs on them felt very much like they tried to build a little tool for you to express yourself in MacPaint, to learn in programs like Culture 1.0, and maybe to do other tasks that felt somewhere between work and play.

I took a lot of the tiny graphical elements combined with original shapes and textures and worked with my friend {protocell:labs}, and PartyDAO helped get us rolling on creating a generative project that expressed the excitement and flowing confusion of an amateur sitting down at a vintage Macintosh to try to use and manipulate this creative world of static ideas. This is the generative backdrop to the front end web experience.

The cultural programs and HyperCard stacks I found were fascinating because it was like looking at little miniature encyclopedias and essays. It was all so limited when you compare it with the vast amount of information on Wikipedia or available in blogs and posts and articles on the world wide web. There was a period there of about 6 years between when HyperCard was launched and the Internet proper took over where people at home were creating and sharing these little “stacks” of creatively dressed and interactive information that was so limited - this is just what some particular person somewhere knew enough about to make. The culture program was a bunch of typical printed encyclopedia entries that now seem dated. Yet - knowing these contents is what constituted your ability to think - your ability to ride the bicycle.

I had just finished Workstation95 with my collaborator pfeffunit and I pitched the idea of expanding the generative IANGAC project into something more conceptual with all these stylized fake HyperCard images - trying to pretend that these cards were real mini-essays that fit into that era. The pitch probably took me a few weeks to refine with him into something workable, but pfeff is a consummate professional and took the ideas and helped me create something really original: interactive stacks linked by metadata connections between subjects. Mintable to be used as a part of buying these generative behemoth designs.

Thematically: I wanted to make a project that was about our own limits. We have the broader internet now - but we have delegated so much of our internal knowledge to this apparatus I wonder if it works the same. When I think of something, it connects in my mind to all the other things it makes sense for that to link to (or arbitrary connections that are totally personal). If I have not memorized any of the content of so many countless wiki articles, how can I connect ideas? How can I think clearly if my own mind is only populated with a tiny handful of ideas?

In addition to this - I was thinking about how we have talked a lot lately about “post-truth” or “post-fact” America. That facts or truths no longer determine public discourse. You would think this would be a very one-sided conversation, but in the polarized political climate it seems everyone is leaning into their own opinions and their own facts, and the broader consensus has collapsed. In the maps I drew in early days of how this could all be made sense of - instead of just getting angry I started asking “well, have we been here before?” and also “how do we prove something is true?”

These are like, Philosophy 101 questions maybe. Here we are though: in the world we actually live in I proposed some themes that make up this project. We want capital T “Truth” but it can be very hard to get, very hard to prove, very hard to share, impossible to communicate. We want “Facts” - but in the absence of being able to get all the facts about everything, we rely on pragmatic choices, convention, tradition, whatever it is that lets us feel we are still making sensible decisions when we are not all-knowing.

I think society as a whole probably moves between these two poles - (1) being pragmatic and just having to get on with things and (2) convincing ourselves once again that the great project of Knowledge is not worthless - that we can know accurately and robustly enough to make a rational society function regardless of mass opinion. Since HyperCard was a neat metaphor for my own little ideas and thoughts to combine and hold in tension - the project hangs together as a network of ideas. Bill Atkinson himself seemed to envision HyperCard as a way for people at home to construct their ideas and share them. I think also that in history at one time we as a culture give up on logic and fine distinctions and demonstrating our beliefs (for example, the Renaissance) - at another (for example, with Isaac Newton) we again believe that our reason and experience can all be united into a system for understanding and predicting the world around us. All of that is muddied waters with all the art and music and little ideas that mix as we try to sort out a system and instead end up thinking in fruit salads of notions.

Will it end up being forgotten amidst the flood of NFTs, the vitriolic political discourse, the bottomless pit of delegated wiki wisdom? I don’t know, but I had to try to get it out as a visit to the vision, to the dream of HyperCard.