Logo of the Museum of Vestigial Desire
The Museum of Vestigial Desire

Blockage

tags: cables published on:

When you read and if all of the text to be read is visible to you, your cognitive faculties find it difficult to decipher the text or make sense of it in any substantial way. The buffer of the mind should always be clean, if there is anything to be processed on a priority. The buffer gets clogged or filled up for various reasons, and we know the reasons and we want to help you address the issues.

When you are eating and before you are done with the food on your plate, if another substantial portion of food is loaded onto your plate, it is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because suddenly the game changes, from a finite amount of food that you were gradually eating away to eventually finish to a potentially ever-expanding amount of food that you can never possibly finish.

Reading and eating are identical processes.

While eating you consume matter. While reading you consume text. One with your mouth one with your eyes. We consume text differently from how we consume visuals. The former is with resistance, hesitation and utmost care as dangerous text can literally set the reader's mind ablaze (at most times in a totally undesired fashion). The latter on the other hand is with hunger and greed as even the most brilliant visual can only scratch the surface of the daze that our minds have set in. Our minds have settled into a daze as a result of living in an environment of visual clutter and the use of material with utter disregard.

So when you read and you have more reading material available to you than what you can process, digest and make meaning out of, nothing gets done. As a reader, you become useless, unresponsive and unproductive.

Blockage works to prevent this. We do not let you read everything at the same time. We do not let you scan. We force you to approach the act of reading with a kind of precarious instability.

When you are reading a specific sentence, there is no guarantee that the sentence is going to be readable for the foreseeable future ahead. After a point, you read like it is a privilege, not an exhausted, surplus action. Not a default mode of accessing content. You read while you can, and because of the anxiety of not being able to complete reading what you started reading, you read because you want to. And this is good for us. This change in your mode of engagement is good for us, as we use the cracks in your armour, the scratches in the surface of your gloss to permeate content that has the potential of electrifying you.

We block selectively and vary the blockage across the time code of your reading experience not because we want to befuddle you, but the opposite. Because we want you to come alive even if it is for a moment and then we want you to suddenly lap up the intense packages of content, not anxious for a moment about maintaining your status quo.

For the status quo has to be disrupted for the story to be able to move ahead, you let go and we make a move.

‹ index