This brings to mind the time I was at the national art gallery listening to a tour/talk by a well renowned sculptor.
Somebody in the group gestured to one of the pieces and asked “does the transition of the floor from green to grey signify the subject’s disillusionment with current environmental policies and the increasing hopelessness of contemporary civilization?”
The fun thing about art criticism, and the reason I firmly believe in the "death of the author" school of critique, is that even the choices an artist made in the face of constraints, or as a snap decision at three am, often do carry some meaning, and not always one the artist themselves recognize, either.
Presumably they could've gone out and gotten more green. They could've transitioned to bright blue, or purple, or yellow. But they looked at the piece done in grey, and instead of going "Yikes, that's way more bleak than I thought it would be, I'm gonna buy some more green and redo this," they seem to be satisfied with the final piece.
And that means that interpretations that find meaning in the color choice aren't necessarily invalid just because the artist wasn't consciously thinking about what they were doing when they ran out of green at 3 am. Or, for that matter, that an interpretation of an art piece can't be valid just because it's counter to what the artist themselves had in mind.
Because everybody knows GIF means Giraffe Interchange Format!
It was invented by rangers in the Serengeti for keeping track of Giraffes changing between areas. They made graphics illustrating those movements, and the format they used became knows as GIF. That's the secret history of the image format.
The situation is different. The first letter in "photo" is not the "p" but the "ph". They are one. The "h" is a modifier. In "graphics" there is no modifier on the "g".
TL;DR H as modifier was introduced when translating Greek and they were lacking appropriate letters in Latin.
> I'm a phoneticist and a general linguist and "PH" and "F" are, indeed, pronounced the same, and are both represented by /f/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Greek Phi was once pronounced as a hard "P" in Ancient Greek. So, Latin inscriptions wrote it as "PH" to show that it's a P sound, but with more air with H. As Greek changed, so did the Greek based English words. In Modern Greek, Phi is pronounced as "F", and no longer like "PH"/a hard P.
..and I forgot: That means that it should have been J-Ph-EG and not JPEG. They created a completely different first letter by ignoring that "ph" is one letter. The J-PEG pronunciation was obtained by using destructive force.
> "What if F Scott Fitzgerald came up to earth, said "It's pronounced Jatsby", then left?"
Oh what you don't know!
Robert Louis Stevensons 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', the pronunciation of Jekyll should be "Jyeec-ill" (rhymes with 'treacle') and not "Jek-ill".
Stevenson was of course Scottish, and this is how the Scots name is pronounced. However, the latter pronunciation for the books title has come into more common use for some reason.
I had a professor who pronounced char as in “char-broiled”. At least it rhymed when she constantly repeated “char star”, referring to char pointers (char*).
The problem I have with this is that you rarely have the information to do anything more than take wild guesses, and way to often it is used to make confident assertions without basis in anything but preconceptions.
It makes me see art criticism as largely an exercise in fiction writing.
To push back a little on this “it’s not that deep” line of thinking - maybe not in this case but certainly in the past when colours were rare and expensive - “i ran out of green” is something an artist with a patron or a wealthy background would be much less likely to say - while another artist with less sound financials might be constantly running short of green.
The colours used by an artist can hint at their financial position, it is certainly influenced by the science of pigments at the time, and even global trade patterns, extreme weather events in the past, war, etc.
I ran out of green can mean different things depending on circumstances. Some of those things are pretty interesting. Sometimes even a not that deep reason is actually pretty deep. :)
The realistic style of old times also forced the authors to use subtle and hidden symbolism to express themselves so that the main story of the image (which was usually pre-ordered) was not affected. Paintings were meant to be a decoration or a source of religious inspiration, and certainly not an artist's personal expression - and they'd be out of business very quickly if they didn't follow the rules. Now we view the art very differently.
This is what drove me nuts about literary and art classes, in addition to working in an artistic field. I would read artist statements from other artists and think wow, that’s a bit overblown, then talk to them, and it turned they thought it was BS too. But it was what curators and collectors were looking for. In literature classes, teachers would have specific interpretations about symbolism of small details and expect us to share the same interpretation and repeat it on tests.
Curators and gallery owners absolutely demand this.
"Everything you need to know is already hanging on the wall" is not considered an acceptable response.
The work needs to question, challenge, interrogate, and subvert, and artists definitely need to Be Interested in specific culturally niche things.
Lit crit, curation, the gallery scene, and visual and musical criticism are alternative industries - somewhere between symbiotic and parasitic on the creators who make the art.
You can make a very fine career for yourself by developing a reputation for making outrageous statements about other people's work. Popular music journalism isn't too bad at this, but by the time you get to academia it all gets very rarefied, meta, bullshitty, and (in reality) aggressively careerist.
One day I was doing a presentation about my startup and one of the video files wasn't playing so I had to stall for time. I gave an anecdote about my background and after the presentation people started asking me if I did standup comedy and I responded "I guess I do now".
Also, I think I was stalling too well because people remember me being funny instead of what the presentation was about ...
I have a liberal arts degree and this reminds me so hard of basically every literary or artwork analysis I did. People spending way too much time trying to come up with the most bullshit interpretation of things.
It reminds me of that pg essay - the more bogus the liberal arts the more bullshit is used to obscure and complicate meaning.
It was specifically about writing, but the attempt to over complicate still applies imo.
“And then of course there are cases where writers don't want to make it easy to understand what they're saying—in corporate announcements of bad news, for example, or at the more bogus end of the humanities. But for nearly everyone else, spoken language is better.”
Studied too. First thing my teacher said “You have the world of artists, we create whatever we feel the need to create. And there is a completely different world of the art critic. Never let the two meet. There is no license to paint.”
Douglas Adams was a comedic genius. His writings covered science fiction, philosophy, and adventure… and were constantly amusing and hilarious. He wasn’t really a world builder in the sense of Rowling, Tolkien, or Martin. His worlds were often never fully explained as that wasn’t the point of his work. His work was to raise a laugh and provoke thought, not to convey a complete imagined world. The original radio broadcast was in ‘78. The BBC TV series was in ‘81. The game was in ‘84. The books were released in ‘79, ‘80, ‘82, ‘84, and ‘92. It is safe to say that in the earliest tellings, Arthur would not have had a computer. If he had, it would have been one of the 8bit early micros. By ‘84, he’d likely have had a Macintosh 128k. By ‘90, he could have had a plus, se, 2, or something similar.
The real answer is, Douglas Adams was a Macintosh fan. It’s that simple.
To me, Douglas N. Adams' worlds were always much more convincing than Rowling's. They have that accidental, chaotic quality, that seems to be the way the real world is rather than the way Tolkien's is where everything is viewed through the lens of history so thoroughly explained and everything has meaning.
Both authors had different aims. Tolkien's aim was to build an entire fictional word with a rich history. Adam's aim was to reflect upon, and poke fun at, the human condition. (A simplification of course.)
Well, at least until he got a hold of one of those Hitchhikers' Guides :) (which for all intents and purposes seem like a portable, possibly intermittently-networked Wikipedia computer)
The book (So Long and Thanks for all the Fish) was published in November of 1984. At that time, there were only two models of Macintosh - the 128 (released in January) and the 512 (released in September). Numbering and naming didn't start until the 512 was released so the Mac 128 was originally named simply "Macintosh".
That’s right. There were no variants of the gen-1 Macs (if you ignore Lisa.) The 512 was nicknamed the Fat Mac, and IIRC there was a hardware upgrade path from the 128 to a 512: as a result many former 128s “silently” became 512s and you wouldn’t notice this fact unless you looked carefully at the back (or popped up “About this Macintosh…”, or wrote the check yourself.) I think we ended up with 128s that went all the way to 1MB (Mac Plus?) internals eventually, but my memory may be playing tricks on me.
> and IIRC there was a hardware upgrade path from the 128 to a 512
Yep, my parents paid for that upgrade, on my incessant prompting... and now I honestly can't remember if we went to 512k or 1MB... There were some things, I believe, that required at least 512, like I think VideoWorks (which eventually became what everyone now knows as Flash, and which was REALLY fun to play with at the time!)
I do not think that it is unreasonable question. I generally assume that authors have more ideas about their fictional worlds and characters than are revelaed in their books. But there is clearly difference between authors about level of their internal worldbuilding, where one extreme is Tolkien and opposite one is perhaps Douglas Adams.
“Did you think of a particular model of Mac when writing that Arthur Dent had one?” would be a better question then, but I’m not sure that‘s a particularly interesting question to ask?
The thing about Adams with regards to world building is that it was always story first. This is why he wrote four different versions of the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy story. One for radio, one for the book, one for the television series, and one for the movie. There are differences, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, between all of those versions. Many of those tweaks were there to make the story fit the intended medium better.
He also wasn’t afraid to co-opt his universe and shoehorn in a story from a different source, if needed. I believe that the third book started life as a Doctor Who script.
I wonder how much remaining approachable for listeners who only jump in on nth episode was a driver of the creative process. "Story first" must have meant something very different from what we might effect today.
My first contact was hearing it on the radio some night, a German language radio version likely created long after the books became the defining version. Makes me wonder which original version it was closer to. Could have been a close translation of the original radio version, could have been a radio reboot based on the books.
I will have to paraphrase this as I do not have a copy and cannot find an ebook version for sale - in Languages of the Night Ursula K. LeGuin was asked by some famous editor to do a talk / article about her research on Earthsea, show the maps, lexicon of the language and so forth to which she replied something like
"Dear famous Science Fiction editor,
While I know that this is the way many people write, it is not the way I do it. "
Her description of her process was that she made it up as she went along but because of her characters or locations there was always only one reasonable choice. So for example when Vivian is biting on Reginald's ankle he says "I do not think this is at all pertinent to the matter at hand", because, being Reginald what else could he possibly say? (anecdote about Reginald and Vivian from the article although no doubt mangled by the years between reading and now.
> Her description of her process was that she made it up as she went along but because of her characters or locations
That is a very "local" view of causality and story logic, which could lead to an inconsistent world (like a location being both a rainforest and a desert), which might not matter for the small lart of the world history that is the story, or one that leans heavily on defaults inported from the aurhor's experience (which might or might not be same as the readers')
Tolkien had an answer that he himself wasn’t satisfied with - because an “evil race” was fundamentally irreconcilable with his Catholic faith.
He talks about it in one of his Letters - and says that’s why he ended up having to reduce the amount of “orc talk” because it was making them sympathetic and he didn’t really know how to handle it - for the story he wanted generic disposable “baddies”.
The idea of orcs that you find in the Silmarillion, which is that orcs are elves corrupted by Melkor, is perfectly reconcilable with Catholicism. In Christianity it's well defined what happens to any creature corrupted by evil in the final judgement.
That explanation does not work in Tolkien's universe though. Can orcs be redeemed? Do they still have a soul? What happens to it when they die? Do they go to the halls of Mandos? Can they be reincarnated like elves?
Tolkien was never satisfied with any explanation because he could not fit them inside his world's theology, which is inspired by Christianity but does not match it one to one.
Yes, but it is not that Tolkied did not think about origin of orcs, he thought about it but dit not settled on definite answer or changed its ideas during time.
Read the Silmarillion if you haven't. It's dense (like a history book), but explains the machinations of Morgoth and Sauron, the creation of Dwarves and Orcs, and clears many things up.
The only pity is that J.R.R. Tolkien never finished it, so some things like where Hobbits came from or where the Blue Wizards went remain (mostly) unaddressed.
Some of Tolkien's other writings show that he wasn't happy with the explanation that ended up in the Silmarillion. He had multiple other explanations, and none of those is fully canon either.
Way back when Adams also posted occasionally on his own Usenet group. When he did the answers were often very similar. I got the distinct impression of someone who had found something he was very good at but not particularly interested in doing.
Or, someone who was creative and enjoyed creating things, but when one or two of them get a fanbase, it becomes a burden, because fanbases by their obsessive nature want more of the same.
Adams himself says "I like to think he's the kind of person who would have an Apple Mac", which suggests an existence for the character that is not strictly confined to the sequence of words published in the books.
I'm not well versed in fiction. I am curious though, is there a subset of authors that are more into comprehensive world building than Douglas Adams? Would JK Rowling respond the same way? I suspect not
Douglas Adams has build numerous comprehensive worlds so I don't think it's that. Computers, and the speed with which they've changed, are a particular detail of world building that makes the sort of snarky answer given by Douglas Adams necessary. You see, if he'd written that Arthur Dent had an Apple ][, with a 1.023 MHz CPU, 4 KB of RAM and an audio cassette interface, as was the newest thing available in 1978 when the first version of the story aired, then any readers later on would have been jarringly taken out of the carefully built world, and forced to check when a computer with 4 KB of RAM was modern, assuming their eyes didn't glaze over first.
JK Rowling exercised similar authority in the world she created for Harry Potter, as the Muggle Prime Minister was never named and naming the Prime Minister Sir John Major or Tony Blair would have done a similar disservice to that world.
Dirk Gently had a reference to the Macintosh II. Perhaps not a specific model, but enough to date the book. I think the truth is he was an enthusiast and simply dropped in references on whim. Besides, he never really struck me as a world builder since the stories seemed to craft the world rather than the other way around.
You are right about technology references being jarring. I nearly died laughing while reading the Wrath of Khan about a decade after its release. The size of a game mentioned in the book was dwarfed by games at the time I was reading it by over an order of magnitude.
Adams says as much as that he's not a "world builder" in the linked article, yeah.
I get it. I've done extensive worldbuilding for a couple of stories, and it can be a lot of fun! You find yourself researching everything from the geological and climatological history of Earth to the detailed mechanics of gravitational slingshots. And then most of that ends up not really mattering all that much to the story, because for the most part what matters in a story is the characters and their relationships, and the worldbuilding mainly goes to determining what situations and circumstances can feasibly arise. And then you probably end up throwing out or reworking a bunch of it anyway, when you have a compelling scene that the research says can't happen, and the scene does more for the story than all the worldbuilding in the world.
Worldbuilding is best done with caution and in moderation - it's useful to an extent, but it can also easily become a rabbit hole at the cost of the story it's meant to support. You'll rarely err by spending less time in research and more with the characters whose stories you are after all trying to tell.
(Granted, given Adams' prior experience as a Doctor Who scriptwriter that gave rise to his most famous series, and also his legendary work-shyness, I don't really credit him with having thought the whole thing far enough through to identify the general case. But who cares? His most famous series is famous for a reason, and I've never really felt the lack of a concordance describing the complete history of the Vogon bureaucracy or a Wikipedia page about Milliways.)
I’ve had discussions with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle on this subject, and they’ve pointed me to other writings on the matter.
For those authors who do a lot of world-building, the reader never sees 90-99% of the world that is built. The purpose of doing that world building is to have a scaffold on which the story can be hung, and which will help keep the story self-consistent.
As a reader, you don’t need to know why a character had a particular relationship with their parents in a certain way, or what the nature of that relationship was. However, the nature of that relationship might drive a number of critical choices that the character would make, and therefore drive the story in a particular direction.
I know that for my own characters I’ve created for role-playing games, I can get quite creative in their backstory, and write many pages on the subject. Most of that will never, ever show up in any game that I play, but I can also guarantee that all of it will inform choices that the character makes as we go through the campaign.
Well, yeah, absolutely. Not that I imagine myself in a league anywhere even near that of Niven and Pournelle, but nobody sees most of the work I did in figuring out what would be plausible on the Earth of 170mya, either. But I've also encountered, and I suspect you probably have too, stories in which the work of worldbuilding was far too obvious, to the detriment of the story. That's really all I'm speaking against here, although I grant I didn't do a very good job making that clear in my prior comment.
Worldbuilding AS the story definitely does not work. If you’re going to do worldbuilding at all, then you have to have a story and a plot that will hang on that worldbuilding as the surface visible material over the structure provided — or the skin over the bones. And that skin still requires some flesh that occurs between those two extremes.
IMO, the Silmarillion made for good worldbuilding. But not so good as an actual story.
The Macintosh II was released in 1987, the same year that Dirk Gently was published. Specific models (like the IIx) weren’t released until the following year. Despite his reticence in TFA it’s obvious that Adams knew exactly which computers his characters were working with, because they were exactly the same computers that Adams worked with and loved.
The lack of cell phones seems obvious at first but then you realize that wizards don't need them. I liked how Harry Potter could have taken place at almost any point during the 20th century and beyond.
The story timelines largely predate the availability of cell phones, but Rowling was quite specific about when it is set, with exact dates mentioned for key points in the story:
I'm reminded of an excellent tweet from a while back:
> Someone told me that Harry Potter is supposed to take place between 1991 and 1998 which is ridiculous because not once in seven books does a single character say, "Man the Chicago Bulls are having a hell of a run huh?".
The books are set in a fantasy version of the UK, you would have been very unlikely to hear any reference to the Chigago Bulls during that time in real life.
Not quite: at one point there's a reference to a non-wizard character having a PlayStation, which I found kind of jarring to read at the time, precisely because it pinned the story down to a very particular point in time.
Tolkien is the obvious example. The Silimarillion always struck me as a worldbuilding reference forcibly turned into a story. George R. R. Martin is a modern example.
The level of importance of world building really depends on what the goal is. I don't think h2g2 would have been majorly improved by a lot of world building, but I can appreciate the world building that's been done for Pratchett's Discworld, though that's as much a reflection on the length of that series than Pratchett's priorities
Look to the subgenres of science fiction called "hard" and "high concept".
In hard sf, scientific plausibility is a major desideratum - Andy Weir's The Martian is a widely known recent example, with the entire story built on a foundation of entirely plausible near-future space engineering. (It's also a somewhat rare example in which this focus on feasibility does not come at the cost of characterization.)
In the related but distinct high-concept sf, the story is designed around a given concept such as "what if humans became telepathic?" or "what if FTL communication was possible but FTL travel was not?", and serves to explore the consequences of this idea in great detail. Unlike hard sf, the concept doesn't have to be plausible, but like it, one often encounters stories where the concept outweighs the characters. I think Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is a good example here, outdoing the reputation of its field by using its concept to tell a compelling and beautiful story that also happens to be about giant sapient jumping spiders.
If you take a creative writing class you’ll find it is very common to give characters agency beyond what the author wants (e.g. I was going to have her do this, but she disagreed and did that…) and part of that is building a larger world, creating backstory for the characters. A great example is in the Quentin Tarantino film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” the main character stars in a Hollywood wester TV series. Even though the movie only shows a tiny bit of the series while they’re filming a couple scenes, apparently Tarantino wrote several full episodes of the hypothetical series. This kind of backstory writing seems to be pretty common. (My MFA is in creative writing, so I spent a lot of time with other writers.)
Steven Erickson, Ian C. Esslemont and their friends spent a decade world building while playing table top games. First Erickson then Esselmont started pouring over that world into the Malazan series.
It is, without question, the largest, most complicated, most inspiring entertaining engaging and satisfying collection of plots, sub plots, sub sub plots, sub sub sub plots, super plots, super super plots and possibly super super super plots. I'm only 2 re-reads in - people who are into their 4th or 5th re-read tell me they are still discovering layers.
The downside is that the first book in the series - Gardens of the Moon - is ridiculously difficult to get started with. There's a read-along blog that Tor did that helped me get through it - but it's still a challenge. I had to downgrade from an audiobook to an ebook and then to a paperback because I kept flipping back to remind myself who someone/something was.
N.K. Jemisin is a currently-active author who is phenomally good at world-building. (Also, resists the urge to show off the world just-because, and instead reveals it organically as the main POV characters interact with it. Highly recommend.)
Well, I don't think Dent's heart is mentioned in the Hitchhiker's books but still he has one. Why? Because he is a human being, and by default those have hearts (although Adams could have made it otherwise).
The general point is that inevitably works of fiction drag truths from the real world into the fictional one. Many things (and perhaps which Apple computer Dent had in particular) are neither true nor false in the relevant fictions, but that doesn't mean that inquiring whether they are is nonsensical or misguided.
Perhaps it’s reasonable to reflect on how performant CGI was and still is. Right now that site is probably receiving more traffic than it ever has before and seems to be ably holding its own against the hug of death.
Of course CGI has scaling issues, that is not deniable, but it is still a quite strong technology. I would argue that the main reason to avoid CGI is not for performance reasons, few sites will encounter those usage levels, but rather because CGI coding patterns ultimately end up breaking MVC best practices.
Given that it supports TLS 1.3, (HTTPS at all really, given the age), IPv6, etc., someone has been maintaining it all these years. I have to imagine the dynamic content has long since been statically archived, as I'm not sure I'd trust the security of any late 90s perl cgi script.
Something about CGI and perl always rubbed me the wrong way.
On every request, you're spawning a new process from disk, reading the entire script's source code (including everything it imports), compiling it, and running it, just to throw all that away.
I do appreciate how simple it is, and how much it inherently frees its own resources, but it seems super wasteful. I'm actually quite shocked how common it was in the early days of the internet.
Spawning processes on unix is very cheap, Perl was very fast, and even back then disk cache in RAM was a thing. It's a perfectly fine solution if your site doesn't need to scale, and most do not.
I'm definitely aware, having done a lot of CGI programming in perl myself back then. But nowadays it just seems so strange to boot up an interpreter and start parsing/validating/executing a script from scratch on every request. Even if you have disk cache and fast process launching, it's just a lot of work you have to do each time.
I suspect the site in question has rather less than a million hits per month, and the development staff is more a week of contractor time every couple of years than a full time team.
This would make it hard to have a continuity of legacy technology devs and make it more likely that it just gets archived by a future team as that's easier than finding the appropriate expertise.
Every day I visit a site that reminds me how durable code really is. I'm starting to see programs that are outliving their developers. In many ways it is surprising given the amount of churn there is in the techniques and tools we use to build software.
I suspect this question's answer was more just an opportunity to write what he did for comedic effect, as opposed to any actual impossibility of answering the question being asked.
I mean, his entire writing career was dedicated to inventing details about people who don't actually exist. That's writing.
He created the world to tell the story; he didn't tell the story to create the world. The story is primary, and if a detail is irrelevant to the story, why invent it? Some writers do it the other way around: they invent a world and then make up stories that happen in it, but I don't think Adams approached writing in that way.
The answer is about the story writing process, which is more interesting than philosophizing about the model of Dent’s Mac, which is why I think he chose to answer that way.
Strange. Not funny. But the key of creating of an artificial world is not that they are artificial but it is a world. And we concern with the character because that world is linked to this world. Obviously some question is crazy. But what is his favourite food in earth, what tv programme he liked to watch … all valid questions. The storyline may mean it is not what the writer want to create. But the world is independent from the author somewhat. If he cannot add to it, we can. That is the fundamental argument for the arthur not the only voice matter in the world it created.
I have the same kind of bafflement that he does here whenever anyone starts really getting into the details of fictional characters. I see it often when people get upset when a character on a TV show or in a video game changes in some way. I can't relate to it at all, I don't understand it. If you were perfectly willing to pretend this character exists at all, why can't you just pretend they're still the way you want them to be? None of it is real, it can be anything you want to imagine!
Why would anyone care what kind of computer Arthur Dent had?
It’s interesting that Adams didn’t have a particular model in mind, that Apple Macintosh could be a generic reference given that Adams did do HyperCard development. Maybe he saw that from the eyes of a storyteller and not a technologist.
This reminds me of reading Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six” many years ago after being a little familiar with the Game. I recall one of the characters doing some espionage work and unpacking his explicitly stated Macintosh PowerBook. Clancy was an avid Mac fan and I feel like a lot of us at the time (especially the rough days of the mid 90s) it was a nod to other Mac fans.
I never finished the book, I wasn’t really into Clancy.
Clancy and Rush Limbaugh were two prominent Mac advocates in the 1990s when Apple seemed doomed and everyone outside publishing and graphical design had more or less abandoned the Mac.
> "What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?" is a completely unanswerable question.
No, he just doesn't want to answer it. Which is fine.
But there are like, hundreds of other writers who would expound in great detail on the type of computer and its relationship to the story-- until their handler scoots them off to sign autographs or pay bills or whatever.
That's just an appeal to authority. You're essentially claiming that the question is unanswerable because Douglas Adams-- a funny and insightful author-- said so. Meanwhile, I'm quite sure Frank Herbert would talk at length about little details of his characters and goings on in the Dune universe.
Hell, even Linus understood this-- see the "s is sad" commit[1] from a four-year-old and Linus' relevant rant[2].
It's delightful to me that the world's crankiest operating system maintainer is more willing to entertain trifles than a fiction writer!
It's not that the question is unanswerable, but that there are competing conceptions of what fiction is. For some writers, what's in the book is all there is. The characters don't have a life outside of the book. Nothing happens to them after the narrative or before it or outside of it. There is no world beyond what they create. If a detail isn't included in the text, then it doesn't exist. Asking a question like "what mac?" is a sort of category error. It's like asking Edvard Munch what the man depicted in The Scream had for breakfast.
I feel this answer is really the only fair one - unless you DO have it as part of the story or the story background these kinds of “fan questions” lead to flippant answers that are designed to fit the current day.
Somebody in the group gestured to one of the pieces and asked “does the transition of the floor from green to grey signify the subject’s disillusionment with current environmental policies and the increasing hopelessness of contemporary civilization?”
The artist’s reply was “I ran out of green.”