As is only appropriate, my creative response is the product of judging a book by its cover.  Or, rather, a digital work by its thumbnail.  And it’s true: a bright yellow light attracts the unsuspecting, FYI.  Separation/Séparation is an interactive piece created to illuminate and combat the ailments that result from extensive use of a computer.  The author specifically addresses RSI, Repetitive Strain Injury, a term that addresses a state of both physical and mental exertion.  While the body may hurt from the innumerable hours spent slouched in an office chair looking at a computer screen, the brain has “bonded” with the machine and is incapable of really functioning without it.  As the author points out, the paradox of the program’s name is in the fact that “separating from the computer is painful, but to write with it again is painful as well.”  I myself have found irony in that users have to use the computer in order to reach this program that advocates for human/machine separation.

Anyways, the piece is a poem, an ode to a computer, that visitors have to click through to finish: the words of the poem appear one at a time with each click of the mouse.  But, BEWARE.  Clicking too fast, or what I considered to be a normal reading-speed, prompts the program disable clicking-abilities and detain you with a dialogue box that accuses you of not having “the right attitude in front of your computer.”  To make amends for your wrong-doing and before you can continue the poem, you must admit your sins by owning up to: clicking too fast; clicking with too much force; not having your eyes in the correct viewing position; or your muscles being too tense.  With every following speeding infraction or when you’ve come to a checkpoint in time, the program again disables your clicking-abilities and prompts you to put some space between you and the machine.  Stretch out your facial muscles, relax your shoulders and back, do some deep breathing- this is really heavy work you’re getting into.  You can get to the end and, once you do, you, the human, learn you CAN function without the computer.

As much as I’ve mocked it so far, the Separation program is actually pretty ingenious in reminding computer users to slow down, be conscious of yourself, and just BLINK every once in a while.  Tarleton Gillespie’s article “The Stories Digital Tools Tell” actually talks about “the consequences of technology” and how it’s difficult to perceive them before the fact because the tools “are our silent partners…with no agendas of their own” (108).  While Gillespie’s spin is particular to the politics of technology, her appeal to a technology’s consequences, affordances, and intentionality highlights how the use of a computer both aids and disables us.