Laurel  0:00  
So today on HTML Energy, I talked to Emma Rae Norton, who is interested in the computer mouse and coding slowly by hand. Emma's website is marceldochamp.net.

[~15 second musical intro jingle composed by Madalyn Merkey]

Laurel  0:35  
Welcome to the HTML energy podcast, Emma. It's nice to have your energy here.

Emma  0:42  
Thank you for having me.

Laurel  0:45  
I wanted to start off pretty simple and ask you... What does HTML energy mean to you and how do you tap into it?

Emma  0:56  
I think HTML energy means kind of like a slowness to me. And I think I tap into into by slowing down. So HTML has always been a very slow and quiet space for me. I use it a lot to think through things that I'm thinking about.

Laurel  1:24
Yeah, what might one of those things be?

Emma  1:28  
I mean, I'm in school right now. And so most recently, I've been doing a lot of work on the history of the computer mouse. I use HTML to think through things visually. So it's a way for me to kind of get down the things that I'm thinking about into a structure and then be able to move things around within that structure. I've been doing research on the mouse for over a year, and it's a lot of there's a lot of different threads of that research. And so I use HTML as a way to kind of like bring those things together and move them around and think about what I'm thinking about in different ways.

Laurel  2:12  
Yeah, I saw that you made a scrolling mouse lecture that's presented as a webpage. I love how the two sides are scrolling independently. So it really looks to me like prioritized my own understanding, like I could feel free to move either section. Yeah, I was wondering how you got interested in the mouse...?

Emma  2:41  
I got interested in the mouse because I tried to build one while in school. And so I'm in this creative technology program. We're required to take a physical computing class, which I had never done before. And I decided that I wanted to try and make my own computer mouse. I don't exactly remember why I decided that, but I think I had an interest in trying to make something that I interacted everyday. I thought that it wouldn't be the most complicated thing to do, and it turned out to be extremely hard to do. And so I think, when I was met with how complex the mouse was, I just became interested in why. Why was it so complex? And I was just interested in this idea of something that's seemingly simple that looks simple that we use everyday and it's like one of the most ubiquitous technologies computing technologies to date ... that it requires so much ... so many different like tiny moving parts, and so much maintenance is involved to get a mouse to work with a computer. Like the mouse driver is something that I haven't even really thought about at all. And just because it seems to be way over my head. Or like how, how a serial or how a USB connection works, like something like that. But also the shape of the mouse really interested me.

Laurel  4:19  
What about the shape was interesting?

Emma  4:22  
It's for your hand. I think like when you look at it, you can look at it and it looks like something that you want to pick up. But it doesn't really go much farther than that. Like there's nothing about its shape that tells you that it's for a computer, which I think is interesting. And I think the fact that it's for your hand is so far from where we are now ... where everything is baked into the screen. Everything is very flat. It feels important to me that the there's this technology that is kind of a reminder of the fact that you're a human Using a computer. That this thing was made for your embodied self.

Laurel  5:06  
What was your first website that you ever created like?

Emma  5:12  
The first website I made was called, "Website with the sound of its own making." And I made that in 2010. It was at a moment where I was also in school, 10 years ago, in undergrad. I was studying photography and printmaking, and I was making a lot of work about... my question was, "What does the internet look like?" So that was my driving question in my last two years of school. It's 2010, which is I think was when the first iPhone came out. It felt like a lot of things in terms of how we're really into computers and how we're relating to each other with computers, or at least how I was experiencing computers ... that started to shift.

In thinking a lot about what the internet looks like, I decided that I wanted to try and learn the language of the internet or the language of the web. And so I made this very, very small website. Very minimal amount of HTML. Just the <html> tag, and the <head> tag, and the <body> tag. And then there was an <audio> tag in the <body> tag, that was a recording of me writing that HTML page. So it was a gesture towards this question, "What does internet look like?" It kind of became, "What does the internet sound like?" or "What does making the internet sound like?" That was the first page I made. And then I took this class in college that was a basic web development class with Michael Bell-Smith, and I made a bunch of funny hand-coded web pages in that class as well.

Laurel  7:05  
Cool. How long was the audio file of the website making?

Emma  7:09  
I think it's like a three or four minute file, but I put it into a loop. So I think the file now is like 20 minutes. I think I put it into a loop because I eventually burned it onto a CD. So I just wanted to make it a little bit longer so that people could listen to it. I've heard that it's very relaxing to listen to while you're working. It's a nice to listen to while you're doing computer work because it's just typing. But I think it's very short. I mean, I think the amount of time that it takes to type out <html> tags, <head> tags, the <body> tag, and an <audio> tag.

Laurel  7:50  
Yeah, that does sound very soothing. It reminds me of how, now during the quarantine, it's really nice to hear other people doing menial tasks.

Emma  8:00  
Yeah, it is nice. Someone mentioned that recently. Like I was on a Zoom call... they were just saying how nice it is to hear the background, like even just like a car driving by or someone closing the door. It creates a little bit more intimacy, I think.

[Sound of typing]

Laurel  8:30  
Do you have a favorite HTML element?

Emma  8:34
I think at one point, it was the <marquee> tag. But I think that tag is deprecated, right?Or it still works, but it doesn't really work that well, or something. But I do really like that tag just because it's representative of a different kind of web. Like when <marquee> tags seemed like something that you would that you would want or need for your page. I think now, when the <marquee> tag goes away, I think my second favorite HTML element would be the <span> tag.

Laurel  9:10
The what tag?

Emma  9:15
The <span> tag, yeah.

I think that's because it doesn't have any inherent styles attached to it. And it's not a block level element, so you can put a <span> tag around something super specific that's not necessarily related to what it is. I mean, it requires CSS to do stuff with it. But I think being able to be hyper specific with the with a tag is exciting to me. Every time I make an HTML page, I always remove all of the inherent CSS that's applied to those tags. I like to work from like the ground up. It kind of goes against what works well about HTML, but I do often do that. So the <span> tag does that for me.

Laurel  10:05  
Cool, nice choice.

Emma  10:08
What's your favorite tag?

Laurel  10:10
Oh, this is hard. I actually really like the <audio> tag. Yeah, we have some good <audio> tags on the HTML energy website. So, yeah. [laughs]

Anyway, I want to ask you about your workshop, "Hand Coding Round Robin", which from what I understand ... is a slow coding collaborative workshop that you first did at The School for Poetic Computation's "Code Societies" program. Is that right?

Emma  10:45  
Actually first did it in Taeyoon Choi's, who is one of the founders of SFPC, in his class at NYU. So I first did it last year in a class called "Teaching as Art". I lead that workshop to a small group of people. But I think I did it to probably the biggest group of people at SFPC's Code Societies this past January.

It's funny because I'm realizing that everything's coming out of [laughs] school. The structure of the classes to kind of develop your own workshop. And HTML is just something that for a long time, I've been really comfortable with. I learned web development very slowly on my own in a class in undergrad. It just felt like a language that I was very comfortable using, and so it was one of these things that I was excited to teach and share with other people. When I got into Tayeoon's class, it immediately became clear that I wanted to have a workshop developed around hand coding. And I don't really remember how the Round Robin part materialized, but the beginning of the workshop starts with a little lecture that I give. And the lecture is goes over some of the things that I think about a lot, which is like the relationship between humans and computers and how computing has evolved over time... how it's started with this very physical kind of interaction where there was ostensibly no software, and it was very hands-on. And it's kind of evolved into this seamless, proprietary, very flattened interaction. I like to present that history to recognize why I'm interested in something like hand coding, which I feel is a little bit closer to that feeling of being more intimate with your computer, and also slower. So the round robin part plays into that idea of loosening, kind of like removing someone's like the control or some of like the ownership that you have over your computer and feeling what it feels like to move around someone else's computer. I just think that's something we don't really do. I feel like a lot of I feel like a lot of deep attachments to my personal computer. And I think it's important to at least question why I feel those attachments, and how much illusion is involved in that attachment, and what it feels like to let go of some of that. So the round robin part is where people will stand up and move to someone else's computer and continue the workshop ... which is just building HTML pages... HTML and CSS web pages.

Laurel  13:56  
Yeah, and do you prompt your participants with anything? If they're like, "What should I write?"

Emma  14:03  
Yeah. So I realized at the Code Societies workshop that it's really nice if the group is already in conversation with each other and they're already very comfortable with each other. So my first prompt is to have the participants meditate on the moment that they're in and put down a thought or question they have for the group. Because the next prompt is that someone will come to your computer and respond to that thought or that question. The first prompt, I have them write, inside of a <p> tag. So the structure is that I'll give this question or prompt and then I'll also ask them to write it in a specific tag. And so depending on time, I try and go through ... the <p> tag and the <blockquote> tag and maybe a <ul> tag and an <img> tag, and it hasn't really ever gone too much farther than that because of time.

Laurel  15:07  
Yeah. And I saw you did a virtual version of this recently. How did that go? And how did it compare to the real life version?

Emma  15:20  
It was really surprisingly, really nice. I think the difference is ... for the virtual version, a bunch of people came together who didn't even know each other. People were very open and generous about what they wrote in the tags, which was really exciting. But I think there was definitely something missing in terms a precedence of why all these people in the were in the same... I mean, the precedence was that we were on quarantine, so actually a lot of amazing stuff came out about that. But I think it just felt different to not be in a room where everyone had either knew each other or had already been in the same space for a little bit of time. And we had to do it on Glitch pages. Usually have people just have a like a code editor and a browser, which can be really exciting for people who have never written HTML before ... just to see what they're writing appear in their browser, which they use all the time. We had to do it this virtual version on Glitch. Yeah, I think other than that, it felt it felt pretty much the same. It feels very weird to teach online. I think it feels weird to just not feel the physical presence of everyone in the room. But it did go really well. I was really happy with how it turned out and how many people were also excited about it.

Laurel  16:55  
Yeah, I would love to do one, if you ever do it again. Sounds really therapeutic to me too, somehow.

Emma  17:01  
Yeah, a lot of people said that. It is very like meditative. I'm realizing more and more ... more than learning how to hand code, it's just a really a nice way to put people in conversation with each other. It's low pressure and kind of therapeutic where you can  just read something that someone else said and take your time to respond to it. And it's also pretty anonymous. You don't necessarily know who wrote what you're responding to. And  I think that's also kind of relaxing in some way.

Laurel  17:44  
So if you could bring any website back from the dead, which website would it be?

Emma  17:57  
It's a hard question because I feel like ... I grew up on the internet. But I was never part of like any community online ... there are no websites I remember that I really that I want to bring back.

Laurel  18:15  
What do you remember about that time when you say you grew up online?

Emma  18:20  
I just remember AOL Instant Messenger. [laughs] I feel like that's a lot. I also remember growing up ... I would see my grandma every weekend. I remember giving her like computer lessons every weekend. That's also where some of this hand coding slowness comes from. Just having to be slow with someone who did not grow up with computers. Yeah, that's tangential. I think maybe a website that I would want to bring back is a Craigslist from the early aughts or the late 90s. I think it would just be interesting to see what is going on in that time on the internet. I think it would just be an interesting way to peek into, I don't know, missed connections or the electronics for sale page or something like that. Also, because Craigslist is a website that just hasn't changed... at all.

Laurel  19:21  
Yeah, that would be really fascinating. Yeah, it's funny, because it looks like it doesn't change overall, but I feel like they're always making little improvements.

So if you could describe your energy in one word, what word would that be?

Emma. 19:38  
I kind of realized this about myself at Code Societies. I think it would be "porous". Yeah, this word came to me during Code Societies. My energy is porous, meaning that I'm very open and very like sensitive to other people's energies. And that is sometimes really good and sometimes not so good. Yeah, my energy changes a lot based on the energy that's around me very easily, if that make sense.

Laurel  20:15  
Yeah. I guess when I think of porous I think of ... like a porous rock that has a lot of holes in it. Yeah, so that makes sense... If you are a porous rock in the ocean, the water would just like rush through you, right?

Emma  20:33  
Yeah, I think the other word I've said is "spongy". Sometimes I feel too full of energies around me. And then sometimes that feels very heavy, like a sponge being full of water or like a rock in the ocean. And then other times it feels very light but still open.

Laurel  20:56  
It's funny. I feel like I could describe myself that way too. But I won't go there. [laughs]

Emma  21:04  
I feel that from you. The one or two times we've met. [laughs]

Laurel  21:12  
Whoa, what gave you that feeling?

Emma  21:14  
Well, I don't know. It's just the energy that you give off feels similar maybe ... It felt very like familiar to me, your energy. And so the way I'm describing my energy, and if you're saying that you feel that you have a similar energy, I think that that's true. Or I felt that from you.

Laurel  21:39  
Cool. No, I agree. Yeah.

Laurel  21:44  
So I know you've been talking about HTML for a while. But what's your opinion on CSS?

Emma  21:50  
I think it's interesting to me like I always think HTML and CSS has been kind of like tightly coupled. I think it's interesting to just think about HTML alone. It's something that I haven't done a lot.

Laurel  22:06  
Yeah. I mean, I feel like what I like about HTML only is maybe something you said about HTML really being about this way to meditate on the structure of the thing itself because it is semantics and hierarchy.

Laurel  22:26  
Do you think HTML energy website shouldn't have any CSS?

Emma  22:31  
I don't think so. [laughs] I think the relationship between CSS and HTML is so exciting. HTML is exciting in that, yeah, like you said, it's semantic ... that there's so much structure already built into it that you can lean on. But then I think to just be able to also use CSS to make that structure your own is important and exciting.

[Musical outro composed by Madalyn Merkey begins, then fades out]

[Sound of a website being made]