Understanding: Forerunners

Cross-stitching and Paint-by-Numbers

When embroidering cross-stitch pillows or painting by numbers, the performer is reproducing a piece of (kitsch) art, and his or her variations are only in the coloring and the occasional imprecise execution. Computer templates could be likened to some recipes for hobby kitsch creation, such as painting Mona Lisa by numbers, or cross-stitching it on a pillow. In fact, the way templates function bears many strong resemblances to the kind of kitsch art analyzed by Umberto Eco in "The Structure of Bad Taste ." Similar to what Eco observes in kitsch, templates collect already familiar elements in order to create a simple and well-calculated effect. Nothing is new or striking, everything is proven to be effective, but most of all well known.

Kitsch is a concept that only has its meaning when compared to high art, however. Home pages, blogs, or home videos rarely aspire to be art, especially when made with templates from Blogger or Geocities. A better way of describing the use of well-established effects is to use the metaphor of clothing. Choosing a template is to pick an outfit in which to dress up your words or images. Like clothes, visual styles carry connotations that can be far from subtle in the way they connect with well-known currents of identity, culture, or fashion. PowerPoint is power dressing for your words.

Rhetoric's Commonplaces

We may also find forerunners in the methods of poetics and rhetoric with their lists of commonplaces. In classic rhetoric, the list of commonplaces is part of inventio, of finding what needs to be said. But a computer template is just as much part of dispositio (deciding the order of the arguments) and elocutio (selecting the right words and metaphors).

Recommended Photopoints

I discussed the similarities between template authoring and some forms of hobby painting and embroidery. A similar phenomenon is the recommended "Kodak Photopoints" found in the Swedish amusement park Liseberg (as well as in tourist spots throughout the world, like Disney World). Throughout the park yellow signs point out places from which it is easy to take a well-composed picture: a copy of someone else's composition, made with the lighting of the day and perhaps with a family member inserted into the scene. Again, the basic structure of the work is given, the performer only adds a little personality and some imperfections. In template authoring systems, it is the other way around. The main work is done by the author, the rigid structure of the template is in the background.

Metaphors and earlier examples such as these are helpful when thinking about computer templates, but they can only take us so far. We have no precise precedent or theory to apply to templates and their prescripts.

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Templates became widespread in the general public with the "what you see is what you get" word processors during the personal computer revolution. As computer systems grow complex and complicated, templates and "wizards" are the counter-measures.

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Manovich notes how even the most advanced authoring systems offer ranges of pre-created parts that may be combined with other parts and altered with pre-created filters and routines.

Although we can find historic tools that resemble this process, the variability of computer media is something that comes into being with the multimedia computer.

Due to the unique modular and variable structure, templates are unique to computer media. Creativity-as-selection is restricted to the predefined choices, yes, but Manovich sees these restrictions as necessary for creative practice: if everything were to be coded from the bottom up, it would take a very long time to create anything interesting. We should add that a great many people who do blog, edit home video, or maintain home pages would never be able to do so without templates and creativity-as-selection.

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