Beyond The Practical: Apps As Culture

We’re familiar enough with apps now that we  no longer need them to be so basic. The rise of artsy, playful apps suggest that people are ready for something a bit more interesting.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has added an app to its permanent collection for the first time. Biophilia is a hybrid between an app and music album with interactive graphics, animations and musical scoring, and it was the first of its kind when it was released by Björk in 2011. “At that time, a year after the iPad had been introduced, designers and developers were excitedly experimenting with apps that took advantage of a screen bigger than the iPhone,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of the department of architecture and design at MoMA. “With Biophilia, Björk truly innovated the way people experience music by allowing  them to participate in performing and making the music and visuals, rather than just listening passively.”.
So does MoMA’s interest in apps mean that they are not just technological tools, but also culture? Or could it be that apps are ‘art’? The lines are blurring, as demonstrated at last summer’s “Digital Revolution” art show at London’s Barbican. “Digital Revolution” was a thorough exploration of how the rise of digital culture has influenced artistic expression, so why shouldn’t art also be making its way into the world of technology?
When apps first made their way onto the market they had to be kept pretty simple, in part because they were a novelty as people needed to learn how to use and become comfortable with them. But now that apps are second nature to most smartphone users, there’s plenty of scope for developers – and even artists – to have a lot more fun with their apps without risking turning people off.
Take a look at Somebody, an app from artist, writer and filmmaker Miranda July. It’s a messaging app, but with a twist: the app allocates a stranger to deliver your message verbally, alongside any requests for personalisation you may have. “Half-app / half-human, ‘Somebody’ is a far-reaching public art project that incites performance and twists our love of avatars and outsourcing. Every relationship becomes a three-way,” said July.
Another app that straddles the line between useful and artsy is Shadow, whose premise is to let people continue in their actual ‘sleep’ dreams. “Modern alarm clocks destroy dreams, because they rip you through your hypnopompic sleep state, the state between sleeping and waking. The idea is to come out slowly,” Shadow founder Hunter Lee Soik told ‘The New Yorker’. Users can speak or text their dream into the app the moment they wake up, said Soik: “We feel this is a huge data set that is literally forgotten every night if it’s not written out. What we’re trying to do is build a community of dreamers.”
Fog of World is a dreamy approach to the waking life. The name comes from the video-game term ‘fog of war’, where unexplored territory is greyed out. Fog of World works the same way, by clearing the “fog” from the map as you walk through each area. “After I started testing ‘Fog of World’ outdoors at the development stage, I’m always surprised by new places near my home which I had never been to in the past 10 years,” app developer Olli Wang told ‘Business Insider’. “I want to use the exploration map to […] explore more of the world, so I can use the map to find places nearby but I’ve never [visited].”.
When it comes to business apps, companies still opt for practicality as no amount of quirk will compensate if the app doesn’t perform its primary task. But these artsy, playful apps show that increasingly, as people are warming to apps, they are open to some more unusual approaches.
Maybe the next step for business apps is a less straightforward approach? After all, if all your competitors have a nicely functioning app, the next challenge may be to develop something that’s not just useful, but also fun, stylish or even rewardingly challenging for the user.