betwixt festival 2016

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I was interested to see the Betwixt Festival at the Art Science Museum. I am unable to make it down to see the works (it was a crazy week) but I went online to do more research on the works. I find it encouraging that there is increasing exposure to the public about software and net art. One of the works that I found on the website is #dataselfieme by Sarah Mamat. That was the only work with the most information I can find. The project makes use of the self-tracking app called Moment, which is designed to help you keep track of the amount of time you pick up and use your phone. She combines the information with a GPS app to track her movement around Singapore in a day. Anyway this project makes me think about a couple of things that I personally feel I should look out for in my own work:

1. drawing with data: I find that the use of GPS drawing is quite a cool concept. I just feel that there could be more to these abstract lines than well… just abstract lines. Perhaps it is a matter of presentation, but many times, these minimal lines look good just because. I think that there is more than can be done for these GPS lines to enhance their meaning. If this work was interactive/animated, there will be more potential for such abstract linework to be put in a more meaningful context that is relevant to the theme.

2. being relevant vs context of the work: I struggle with this in my own work and I see this issue existing in this work as well. The exhibition describes the work as a “contemporary digital self-portraiture”, which I am not sure if it is at all a good description of the work. On the artist’s website, she describes this it as a “portrayal of detailed movement while capturing the essence and totality of the artist, presenting it in a different perspective.” I think what we can glean from the work is that the artist picks up her mobile phone pretty often throughout the day, and certainly this is relatable for most viewers, because it is not uncommon for us to pick up the phone plenty of times. Through her documentation in the few months, I find the data quite repetitive. It makes me think about what makes a good piece of data visualisation and why it works for the really good ones: that it is really important to find something meaningful to highlight from the dataset and tell a story from there. The dataset can always be made available, as something separate from the work, to provide a more detailed insight. In the case of this work, it is a lot of info that doesn’t translate to much, especially about something that we do everyday, and so often. It’s not really a strong dataset that could simply exist on its own and carry its meaning well.

3. lingo: I feel that when it comes to making works using apps that we make use of in our everyday life, there is always a tendency to self-reference by peppering the work with trendy buzzwords. I am a slight detractor of the use of hashtags. I think it has its place on social media platforms and it is part of the language there, but other than that, taking it out of that context often seems like a contrived need to keep up with being relevant to our world today.

That said, I think I also need to pay more attention to how I can properly context my work so that (as far as possible) it doesn’t fall trap to these things. I’m generally concerned about how some parts of my work is deemed ‘trendy’, something that I only quite recently discover why, thanks to Chloe and Qixuan who shared with me some interesting articles and websites. I think it’s the imagery that I’ve been using: screenshots of dated, defunct applications, which are also part of the visual vocabulary of a Tumblr subculture that makes references to those applications. Being able to easily find these screenshots was really helpful for me to try and illustrate the idea of the impermanence of technology, particularly of tools such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Paint, where most people my age probably started with in making any digital art. I hope to make this point a little more clearly so that people don’t confuse this with an existing Internet art trend and then trivialise the nature of my work by the associated (negative) connotations of making Tumblr-inspired artwork.

data visualising references + progress

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Here’s a good link that I am going to bookmark for when I get a hang of javascript. This gallery on Github displays a great variety of data visualising scripts. I have not figured out how they work, specifically, but they all come with some very handy tutorials.

I find this to be a wonderful alternative to building a WordPress theme from sketch. I mentioned in my previous entry that I have trouble importing all of my blog posts to my own server, so I cannot make use of the WordPress plugins anyway, as a large percentage of my entries will not be accounted for.

I spent the day drawing out some general statistics from January 2005 – May 2005. Here’s a sample:

word01

I did this for each month.

 

My main purpose for doing this is to sieve out the metadata so that I can tell a story with these figures and tags. I don’t intend to show any of my blog entries, as I feel that they don’t necessarily describe my relationship with blogging. Also, working with metadata helps to build my work around the bildungsroman theme by offering a bird’s eye view of the topics that I write about, taking into account the frequency of details like exclamation points (which I later renamed to “emotional punctuation”) after I notice that I used to end my sentences with lots of !!!!! and !?!!?!??!? whenever I feel frustrated. Words can also be associated with certain kind of lingo which will define some of my hobbies, like ‘skin’ and ‘layout’, for example. These words were used to describe the my blog themes then.

I find some of the examples of data visualising techniques on the Github gallery are pretty engaging. They also look really amazing. I think that I can definitely work the script to my advantage and incorporate my illustrative style to make my work more engaging.

blogspot.jodi

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During 2006 and 2007, Jodi made the work <$blogtitle$>, based on the social publishing tool Blogger, from Google.13 <$blogtitle$> looks like a Blogger page in a broken state. The pages generated by Jodi’s (mis)usage of the tool are either filled with gibberish or in ruins. It’s hard to say: perhaps you are looking at back-end code.

Jodi indeed plays with different language systems, for instance the visual and the non-visual source (code) of the Blogger software. Template formats such as the title of the blog, the post headers and certain blog addresses in the link list appear all in ruins, while Blogger-specific images like comment-icons, dates and additional otherwise functional visual elements are now reduced to theatrical objects.

glitch’s formal fragmentation signifies that the work is ‘open’ to inter- pretation and meaningful engagement.

By ruining the Blogger medium, Jodi’s use of formal fragmentation opens the platform itself up to deconstruction, interpretation and further active engagement. As a result, the meaning of the ruined work is never finished, whole or complete.

However, for the reader to actually give meaning to the ruins, they must take the initiative of imposing (their own select) new constraints, new frameworks of analysis and limitations on other possibilities.

this openness also had a negative consequence: Blogger interpreted the blog as a malicious spamblog and consequently blocked it. This act could be described as a rather rigorous ‘death of the author’, in which the meaning of the work is not negotiated, but instead dismissed and deleted.

<$blogtitle$>, Jodi shows that a glitch can be com- pletely constructed (by the artist), but also that such constructs can in turn reveal the con- structedness of software-generated knowledge and expression.

— Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um)

Jodi.org is the brainchild of two Internet artists, Joan and Dirk. Keying jodi.org into your address bar spawns a series of webpages that are rather crazy, like they are taking over your browser. Some of the effects generated by the website include: constant page redirects, flashing images, auto-downloads, wacky URLs. Their style of internet art/glitch art have been described by Wikipedia as “the work of an irrational, playful, or crazed human.”

One of the side projects that resulted from Jodi.org was the duo’s experiments with Blogger pages. I came across the work while reading Rosa Menkman’s Glitch Moment(um) essay.

Jodi deconstructed the standard Blogger pages, causing it to look broken. The pages looked like what would happen if you enter the source code of the pages and remove some important parts of coding, that renders certain functions useless (i.e incomplete HTML coding to display an image, that resulted in a broken image icon).

I find this work quite an important point of reference for my WordPress theme sketch, which Boyan, Cynthia and I are working on, especially when I think about how I can deconstruct my blog archive by manipulating the functions of a WordPress blog: perhaps altering how categories/tags are being displayed.

 

Art of the glitch: Jon Cates, Rosa Menkman

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Jon Cates, Gl1tch.us

In the interview by Randall Packer, Glitch Expectations: A Conversation With Jon Cates, Jon Cates’ works are referred to as ‘dirty new media’, which is an apt description for the low-fi, hypnotic quality of his animations.  In the homepage of Gl1tch.us, the header image and layout brings to mind the work of David Carson.  Grungy, pixelled, deconstructed… It’s like the virtual version of what you get if you made printer ink smudges or colour half-tone. The low-res quality of gif images is both nostalgic and analog. Another description of the dirty new media I resonated with in the article is that the ‘dirtiness’ in this form of new media work suggests that there’s a human touch to it. I thought it’s a good thing to take note of and try to weave into my work online so that in terms of aesthetic and concept it’s congruent with my print work.

gl1tchussource

 

A closer look at the source code of Gl1tch.us site. I find the layout of source code fascinating sometimes. I’m no programmer and I’ve not done much research into why the layouts look like this, but from a typographical point of view, it makes for an interesting visual experience. One of the things I want to include in my virtual work is this idea of coding. Coding as the backbone and underlying side of what you see on a webpage. Perhaps in order to make this concept accessible for viewers, I could arrange my text layout online to resemble the source code. While typographical explorations on print are always fun, I’m quite excited to see what I can come up with online. I briefly showed the class one of the projects I did over the summer break with my friend where we made ‘glitch poetry’ using predictive text, and then we played with the type and layout. I think I can definitely take it further online by incorporating animated sequences.

 

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Here’s another interesting web layout. This is Sunshine in My Throat by Rosa Menkman. I thought the animated bits were absolutely wacky and psychedelic. Just a visual reference of what I can do…

(ps. need to get started on some work too)

 

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Neopets Retrospective

 

I normally talk about movies and cartoons from the previous decade but I feel it’s time that’s time to discuss something that’s more  exclusive to the 2000s, and that’s the popularization of the internet. I know it’s been around since the 90s, but back then it’s mainly used for pornography and black market goods. I know that’s still the main use to many but as the 2000s decade was progressing, all these new websites were coming along, many of which was for social networking that wasn’t something most kids were going into, so what kids really had then was this wonderful browser-based animal RPG called Neopets. It’s where I went onto the internet when I was young. Neopets was probably riding off the super popularity/success that was Pokemon. Neopets was a site where we could have virtual pets, and there was a large world there that we could do quite a bit in… it was just a quirky early internet site made for college students…

A transcript from the video which I found earlier today about Neopets, and I want to write a bit about it as I think it’s a good starting point/back story to the virtual part of my project.

I think Neopets.com is the virtual equivalent of a physical childhood play thing for some people my age. If you asked them what is their earliest internet memory, perhaps it will be Neopets. Like Pokemon, Neopets is made up of fictional world that is richly inhabited with creatures, items and many more. I didn’t own a GameBoy when I was a child, but once in a while when I meet my cousins, I would borrow their GameBoy and play Pokemon on it. We would take turns playing it and while it was quite fun, I never fully experience the fun of being a Pokemon trainer. But I had a computer at home and my cousin got me onto Neopets. I became so obsessed with it, and I was absolutely enchanted by this rich world. That was in 2004 when I was ten years old.

Anyway I could go on about why I loved Neopets so much, but it is quite embarrassing and I remembered being called a ‘Neopets freak’ in primary school, and it’s not the main idea of this entry… But what I eventually took away from my Neopets-crazed days was learning how to code stuff. There was a page on the website that taught users basic CSS and HTML (things couldn’t get that complicated on a web browser then anyway), which they could apply on their user profiles to beautify it. Looking back, I thought this was a very interesting way to get users to personalize their profiles. I’m not sure what was the reason behind encouraging players to use coding to change their colours of the text and add web links. As a young girl, I was drawn to making my user profile pretty and stuff, so I had to learn these basic tips and I think that really got me interested with web pages and web design. I didn’t have a topic that I was interested in, so I dedicated most of the web pages I made to my dog. I took pictures of my dog and put them on the web page, and accompanied the photos with stories about her. neopetshtml

Anyway, I got really carried away making all these web pages. But it was all in good fun, and I eventually quit playing Neopets, moving on to making more of these webpages for good.

I wish I had screenshots for all these stuff. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to embark on the virtual part of my project. The Internet is brilliant, and with it, we are able to keep track of data. I quoted Deyan Sudjic previously about the immortality of data on the virtual reality, but I sometimes feel that paradoxically, all of these data is quite ephemeral, as objects of memory. They are more fleeting than physical things: a piece of Post-It someone left for you, or a piece of jewellery your aunt gave you. The concept of time and relevance on the Internet is perceived differently than in reality. Once something is updated, and new things come along, you can’t really find an old version anymore. Things get old quickly on the Internet. Servers and domain spaces have a time limit. My old websites can never be retrieved again because the free web hosts I were using were either gone, or were developed into something else. I tried to keep backups of my artworks on the Internet on a thumb drive, but I lost it ages ago. Amongst various attempts of rebooting my virus-infected computer also leads to the loss of data over the years. What I have now is my blog, my Internet journal. Even the media I upload have a shaky, unpredictable life span. Old pictures from 2005 cannot be retrieved, because the servers have died. I thought my blog would be the most appropriate thing I can use to talk about this ephemeral nature of Internet memory, because I have been using my blog for a long time, and given it’s time and space on the virtual realm, it is quite a relic. The rest of my Internet ventures have been very short-lived, relevant for the time that it was popular.

Neopets’ rich fantastical world also retains the nostalgic and innocent quality of childhood playthings, albeit on a digital space. When it became really popular back then with children, it was labeled as a website with ‘sticky content’ that got children to spent hours and hours per week on it (children like me). Comparatively speaking, the effects of Neopets on young people is nothing compared to websites like Tumblr and applications like Instagram, both of which are used widely by many young people. Tumblr is also a rich world full of content pertaining to real-life and popular culture. It is a mass Internet media of unfiltered content, which can be a good and bad thing. For example, pornography .gifs are a popular thing on Tumblr. Skinny inspiration is also popular on the website.  I mean, I’m no prude or anything, but I find it quite worrying that such content are so easily accessible to anybody. Along with the few other popular social websites, it generates and feeds a culture that thrives on these images for envy and jealousy. Tumblr’s (in)famous endless scrolling function means that you’re constantly, forever, addicted to this stream of content.

 

Research Critique: The World’s Largest Collaborative Sentence

“The Sentence has no end. Sometimes I think it had no beginning. Now I salute its authors, which means all of us. You have made a wild, precious, awful, delicious, lovable, tragic, vulgar, fearsome, divine thing.”
—Douglas Davis, 2000

I really enjoy Douglas Davis’ The World’s Largest Collaborative Sentence. It really exemplifies what we can do on the Internet, as part of a collective whole, from our own computer, from each corner of the world.

These are some of my favourite parts of the work:

collabsentenc20 collabsentence03 collabsentence04“I’ve lost my stylesheet? Perhaps I never had style to begin with.” (That’s very funny, I will quote that in one of my works later on…)

The work is made by Douglas Davis in 1994, which makes it one of the very early forms of Internet art, and collaborative performance art via a network. Nearly twenty years on, the work is still ongoing and being improved. Imagine the amount of people who have contributed to the content of this massive virtual work.

That is what I enjoy about the work as well — the nature of the work and being able to keep it alive makes me think about what Deyan Sudjic has to say about the Internet:

“Our email and text trails will last as long as the server farms that have already conferred a kind of immortality”

An Internet artwork lives on a server, which allows it many possibilities for expansion, collaboration as well as preservation. This ‘immortality’ of the work gives it opportunity for it to carry on for many generations of people, so it will continue being the longest collaborative sentence. I think this is particularly interesting because the work could also give viewers a glimpse of Internet trends: bits from early Internet art at the time of the creation of the work, as well as things that are influenced by the Tumblr generation.

I enjoy this work a lot, and personally find that it will be useful as a reference work in my final year project too.

 

 

Something about virtual reality

I was going to crawl to bed after my night shower, body loosen up by the heat of the water, phone in my hand, notifications pinging. Wanting to rest, but unable to. I decided to turn on my computer instead and be productive. I still like to work on a desktop. A desktop computer means business. You get too comfortable with the mobility of a laptop.

Two days ago, I decided to delete my Instagram application and say a virtual goodbye to an audience I don’t really know. But in my quest to deactivate myself from social media, I am still inevitably stuck with it because of work commitments. I now have a Facebook account just for class and work. Work accounts are okay, it filters out a lot of crap that are usually on personal news feed. I started to think about why I needed to deactivate myself, always, from social media, and what it means to do that, and how that would influence the virtual part of my project.

This evening we had a little chat about WordPress. The plan was to strongly encourage students to use it to share their work. I thought about WordPress and my long-term use of it for a while tonight, and what the Internet means to me in this project. It begins with blogging. I really enjoy using WordPress. I was a user of Blogger, until I bought my own domain and wanted to transfer my blog to my domain. Unlike WordPress, Blogger cannot be installed on a personal web server. But you could easily install WordPress on your cPanel and create wonderful themes around the script. Creating a blog theme (no matter what blogging website you use), is not as difficult as it sounds. I like to build what I call a skeleton theme, something that is very pared down to the basic elements of a blog: date posted, blog entry, user. Then depending on the purpose I had at the time, I’ll turn the skeleton blog layout into something else.

Through learning how to make my own blog layouts, I met many interesting online friends. There were other girls who made beautiful websites, (which were essentially some well-made themes) and we would comment on each other’s efforts. I got to know them better by reading their blog entries. We all discuss our daily lives, each one of us residing in a different corner of the world, and shared our experiences in making the blog themes. I think that’s why WordPress stayed with me for so long. I have very fond memories of those times. I also like that WordPress didn’t change to something else. It was quite the only bit of the Internet left that I cared about and use frequently. It was media without the social part. There were no heart symbols at the end of my entries inviting my invisible audience to like the post I’ve written. There is no reblogging link for them to share my post on their blog. When I make a theme later on this semester for the virtual part of my FYP, I’ll not be making one that fits people’s mobile phones or to include any of these social quirks. I don’t really care. I know mobile phones are really convenient to view web content quickly. But if you couldn’t spare the time to take a look at what I’ve made on a real computer then it’s quite a waste. I’d want to invite my audience to go to the trouble of creating a username and leaving an actual comment. I think that is akin to leaving someone a handwritten note, in this age.

So I would like to propose that the virtual part of my project is a celebration of these “analog” things before the crazy advent of likes and follows. I think many people of my age would resonate with that. Before followers are called followers, they were called ‘friends’ (i.e Livejournal user profiles) Before stalking someone’s Facebook profile, there was Friendster profiles. And way before that, there was also stalking someone’s user lookup on Neopets. I want to combine these things and my blog content, to create an artwork, as a response of sorts to the question “what did you do online when you were a teenager”?

I also want to be clear about not referencing to social media for this. I won’t be making a Facebook page about this. I don’t want social media to heavily influence the outcome of my work, or to even be a part of the conversation. Perhaps in my project report, I will discuss further about this aspect, but I don’t want to work to have any of these.