Features/Anti-Productivity

From Sedes Draconis

Anti-Productivity:

the New Surrealism

There's a school of art out there, pretty much original to the web, which I came to know as "Anti-Productivity". One of the guiding ethics of the style is "No Content, Just Style". They're also often characterized by dynamic interactivity and a good sprawl to explore. And once you start exploring, you should find plenty of surreal characters and objects. And, of course, none of it should be explained. There kind of like games, but there's no goal, no failure. So really, they're toys, not games, technically.But no explanation, and certainly no instructions.

And yet, they're not totally chaotic. Each has an internal logic to it, just not a logic that has much to do with the rest of the world.

But it's hard to classify exactly which sites feel like Anti-Productivity to me. For example, ExplodingDog feels like AP for some reason, even though it lacks many of the easily described features of the school.

Here are some exemplars of the faces of AP.

Fly Guy

An almsot archetype AP site. Fly. Explore. Interact.

Superbad 

An incredible sprawl. Mao, Ranger Rick, plumbing, Planet of the Apes, Bees, and Jay Junior's confused attempts to get enough foods of the Meat Food Group. Any number of other interactive abstracts. And much, much, more.

The Boobah Zone 

Sort of like a cross between Teletubbies and Whack-a-Mole. Sort of.

Modern Living 

The David Lynch of AP art.

Tiny Grow 

For the Online Surrealist Gardener.

THE REALLY BIG BUTTON THAT DOESN'T DO ANYTHING  

The Granddaddy of all Anti-Productivity Sites, est. 1994. It's since been surpassed. But that is often the way of the leaders in the field. The do the experimental work that sets the stage for other to produce the great masterpieces.

My favorite AP site was the 2000 incarntaion of the Purple Dot, g-h.com. But that site has changed many times, it's nothing interesting right now. And unfortunately the Wayback Machine can't recapture the interactive plug-ins. Sigh.