How slow is too slow? That seems to be the question that Vicky Isley & Paul Smith, members of the boredomresearch team have proposed to answer by means of eight Helix Aspersa snails and eight RFID disc tags attached to each of the snail's shells. In a world where we seem to no longer have to wait for anything, we assume that things happen before our eyes at the click of a mouse. We no longer value the process and the journey that any message we send via email really takes. The snail, seen as such a contradictory method to sending email, really seem to shares some common characteristic of the networked path that we participate in everyday when sending messages over the internet. The only difference is snail mail, in a very literal sense slows down the process, really letting users see the somewhat questionable and uncertain properties that email really can have. After an email seems to whiz from the users computer to realsnailmail.net the process quickly and abruptly slows down as the email is entered into a queue and then assigned to one of the real snails awaiting it’s newest journey in the tank among others. The snail must be in a hot spot where the RFID (radio frequency identification) chip is waiting to be given control over the email. Once the email is assigned to a snail it “slips way into the technological wasteland” as Isley and Smith put it, a representation of the internet or in this case simply a snail tank. The snail must then reach a drop off point at the other end of the tank for the message to be delivered to it’s original recipient. It now carries with it, the details of it’s carrier and it’s long journey from one end of the tank to the other which seems to be taking any where from around 2.5 days to 6 days depending on which snail mail agent your mail is assigned to.
The work initially grabbed by attention via the candid snail mail visuals. I thought that the image of a snail transmitting some sort of data on it’s back was so cleaver in itself just a photographic image really was apiece on it’s own. Then in reading further I realized that really there were a lot of similarities between this project and the networking and communication tools that we had been looking at in class in the past few weeks. Everyone looks for an immediate response, and as we have been finding at times there seems to be some loss in translation and things slow down. This problem always seems to be a technical glitch in the code somewhere or a misinterpreted variable that causes immediate frustration for the user. But what if the sedation of some of this material results in better understanding of the process. As well the use of this snail mail technique puts much more of a personal spin on sending a message as it becomes linked and coupled with something organic, and it brings your message back to a somewhat imperfect system, which is more human then sending you email and just expected that it would get there some day, some time. This allows the sender and the recipient to see really what goes on in the process.
http://www.boredomresearch.net/rsm/index.html
