Avo, Bandersnatch, and the New Grammar of Television (and Games) — Part 4: A Golden Braid of Optimism
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Videogames, Film, Television, Interaction Design, Netflix

I was one of thousands of British kids who hand-typed code from the pages of C&VG into my Spectrum in the mid-1980s. It seemed an almost alchemical process, transforming words on a page or screeches from a tape into images and interactions on-screen. Later, a formative set-text for me, as a late-’80s Comp Sci undergraduate, was Douglas Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. There was a sense that code might produce structures and dynamics that might one day be akin to the complexity of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. And there is none of that magic and beauty in Bandersnatch. Our world is now more cynical about code, or what it has produced, and often for good reason. Yet our issue there is not code, but a particularly virulent strain of capitalism. For all of its craft, Bandersnatch is pointing its narrative shotgun in the wrong direction, when portraying Ritman, code, and gaming culture.

In Avo, Billie’s coding is fluent, virtuosic yet also excited — as far removed from Bandersnatch’s Colin Ritman as one could imagine. It feels optimistic about code, about tech, and about a very human ability to shape these things for collective outcomes. Again, it may be a long bow to draw, but via Billie perhaps Avo also subtly, and implicitly, reclaims a feminist computer science — an eternal golden braid indeed, from Lovelace to Hopper to Johnson — as an alternative to Ritman’s cold, insular power struggles. (See also, the great Code Breakers: Women in Games exhibition, at ACMI.)

This optimism is key to Avo, and can be traced throughout the work of Playdeo’s precursor BERG (particularly their Little Printer.)

It’s optimistic but not utopian, particularly as regards tech. Billie’s lab is a mess, full of detritus and boxes, more like a shed in Solihull than a lab in Seoul.

Her machines, designed for Avo by Oscar Lhermitte, beautifully evoke this hand-built, knocked-together sophistication. This is a particularly British myth, quite unlike a Germanic myth of the half-robotic kilometre square Wolfsburg plant and its surrounding industry-four-point-zeroed mittelstand, or an American myth of the Tesla Gigafactory in the desert. Instead, it’s Trevor Baylis inventing the wind-up radio in his shed, Emily Cummins doing likewise with a solar evaporation radiator, Terry Gilliam’s animations, or Archigram and the entire British hi-tech architecture scene of Rogers, Foster et al growing up amidst World War II and its ‘Hobart’s funnies’, bouncing bombs, Maunsell Forts, inflatable tanks, and flailing anti-mine lawnmower attachments. It’s Bond’s Q, Clive Sinclair, and a MG BGT. Not necessarily reliable, and sometimes not even good, but interesting, inventive, malleable. And thus human.

Hence, perhaps, Schulze’s interest in the contingent reality rather than the fake news of smart cities and IoT, say. He earlier told me, “We’re drawn to frayed edges, torn pieces, broken components, the awkwardness of technology.”

That is not a pessimistic, fatalist position, but in fact optimistic, if you believe in making things that are hackable, endlessly fixable, adaptive and open. It’s a belief in the democratic, transforming power of technology. With its roots in the shed rather than the garage, the North Circular rather than the 101, it feels far removed from the crass blitzscaling of the global platform plays, yet is technically sophisticated nonetheless.

This also concerns size and scale, the unlikely link between the hand, the phone, and the avocado. Avo is not a hulking soft robotics Michelin Man, like Big Hero 6.

Instead, it’s the size of your hand, a product class defined around that intimacy: toys, cameras, pens, radios, and yes, phones.

Almost all of Avo’s antecedents — Swappu, Availabot, Little Printer — are this same scale. Schulze calls them “small objects operating in the big world”