Project Hyperessay

There are 3 posts filed in Project Hyperessay (this is page 1 of 1).

Project Hyperessay 3: Conclusion

Project Link

outline

g.r.f.e experiments with the idea of having the ability to manipulate and eradicate certain areas of our personal history on the virtual realm, using glitch art and the aesthetizing of errors to break apart and censor fractions of content.

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Working on my archiving project while taking Media and Performance class reveals that active participation in the third space even before I realised what it meant. I live most of my teenage years online and on the virtual space, and actively documented my life on my blog. Having a large part of my personal history stored away on a cloud server and being permanently there is like a massive time capsule. Every episode in my life is a click away on my archive page.

Looking through my history of blogging reveals my relationship to the virtual space and how it had shaped me, as an individual and as an artist.

As a visual artist, I ask myself, what can I make out of this archive, of the raw, unedited content? My main focus working on this archiving project is to re-present this content again in a fresh manner that gives new meaning to old identities. It is a bridge that illustrates the transition from adolescence to adulthood, to remember and also to let go.

performative chance art

Each collage created in this webpage is by chance. They are unplanned works of collages. First I begin with a page from my blog or my physical journal. The content is chosen based on how the memory that is recorded on the page made me feel. Some of the entries describe some embarrassing memories in school, some documented certain experiences of loss, anger and sadness from my adolescent years. These are words that painted my teenage self portrait. Then, I manipulated the image in Photoshop, repeating/highlighting text, cancel words or blank out areas completely.

Each collage is also performative way of acknowledging the temporal nature of these issues, and above all, a kind of celebration.

This project experiments with the idea of having the ability to manipulate history and eradicating certain points in that history. It also helps me to find the ability to look at it from a more controlled and mature perspective. Glitching helps to break apart and censor fractions of words that are too confrontational.

long form content

The final work is presented on a webpage built with basic HTML, just tables that help to align the images neatly. This is an open ended project that I will continue to work on as part of my final year project, adding new collages as I sieve through my virtual archive.

The nature of this long form content alludes to my blogging practice as well, a beginning with no end.

reflections

Working on this project had been really fun and I enjoyed the performative and experimental quality of making the gifs out of these collages. I am rather pleased with the outcome of the project as it had come a long way from the ideas that I first presented in the first hyperessay. At first, the scope of my project is quite large: I want to talk about the changing landscapes of social media, from sites like Myspace, tools like MSN Messenger, virtual nostalgia, and the relationship between myself and these sites, but as the semester progresses, I realised that my blog is a better source for me to examine my relationship with the virtual reality.

If I could improve on the project, I would make some of the gifs more engaging: perhaps screenshots of MSN chat windows that mimics a real conversation.

Project Hyperessay 2: Concept & Teaser

glitches.remixes.edits.filters

The title of my final OSS project will be entitled glitches.remixes.edits.filters.

As an artist, my work revolves around picking up the trash and debris that is feelings, and rework them into something that’s worthwhile. A presentable melancholy, an accessible darkness. Melancholia and it’s friends are like glitches. Remixes, edits and filters rework these glitches and help assimilate them into normality, and giving them new life. It is a way to re-represent old information.

As a large part of my work derives from my participation in the virtual, digital space, I’m also looking at glitch art, and digital manipulation as ways of presenting my content. A glitch is defined as a “a short-lived fault in a system and often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot.”. I’m treating this definition in a metaphorical manner in relation to the process of blogging and writing in journals. These accounts are my way of dealing with negativity and issues, and eventually they exist as evidence that indeed, “this too shall past”.

Hence, I’d like to think of the issues I’ve blogged about as glitches, as transcient matters.

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Digital manipulation had been a constant method of my art-making. In these series of collages, I’m combining real collages scanned from my physical journals, and reworking them digitally to create more layers of symbols and meanings. The addition of  the planets, for example, is an allusion to early Internet art, part lo-fi, part ephemera, a reference to my own participation in the virtual space. In the last image, I’ve included some palace chat avatars, “dollz”, which were really popular ten years ago. It goes back to my hyperessay #1 in which I talk about the timeline of social media and popular websites. These dollz and other “relics” – the now defunct MSN messenger, MS Paint – constitutes this sense of nostalgia in the third space.

I’ve also distorted certain parts of the images and increased the colour information drastically, creating highly saturated areas of colours. This produces a “glitched” effect and is also symbolic of the intensity and saturated nature of my journals and blog.

In the first micro-project where we made one minute videos, I’ve briefly talked about the idea of the “double”. I want to go back to this theme as it is quite apparent in my practice.

The ‘double’ refers to writing and illustrating, two halves that make up my main practice as an artist. Writing and illustrating have always existed as separate processes for me and not processes that complement each other. The outcome for this final OSS project will include both writing and visual arts.

Project Hyperessay 1: The Archiving Project

This is a draft and a quick sketch of my ideas, some of these thoughts would require some more fine tuning before being developed into a full-fledged project.

My project will be about archiving memories, particularly memories in a virtual space. What really sparked my interest in this was how quickly I realised the social media landscape has changed. Here’s a diagram of social media I found on Google:

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I would say that that people my age are lucky enough to be able to have internet access at a relatively young age. I remember being able to access the Internet when I was about 8 years old. I think it’s really important to address this point on generation vs Internet, particularly in the area of social media. For me at least, I feel that I entered this whole virtual sphere at an age when it had helped significantly develop my sense of identity, interests and especially the idea of an online persona even before I really knew what that meant. It’s interesting to note though, before I’ve taken this OSS class, I’ve never truly examined the term ‘virtual’, ‘cyborgs’ or the ‘disembodied’, and even I find it hard sometimes to write about it in my research critiques because I think that to some extent, and for a large part of my life, I’ve been really living the virtual life and living out these concepts that we’re looking at, that I haven’t yet stepped back to take a look at all of this.

I was a huge Internet nerd. I was really big on Neopets.com and the website opened me to the world of html and css. I didn’t have much real-life hobbies then, but I enjoyed making webpages and creating content. I made my first blog with Blogger.com and I used my knowledge of basic html and css to tweak my layout so that I could include every facet of my Internet life – I remember adding the same Flickr photostream on the sidebar of my blog and uploaded pictures of my real life desktop clutter, my dogs, and (very rarely) pictures of myself taken with my webcam.  I also bought a domain and explored making more complicated webpages. I loved the idea of having this virtual space for myself and being able to create and add whatever I want to this space.

Back to the social media landscape and what sparked my project: I realised the vast change when I logged into myspace.com a few months ago. It used to be a really popular social media website much like Facebook. The website had changed a lot, and presently, they have removed the blog function. My old profile and photos are still there, although I was more interested to find my old blog. I found a link where I could download a zip file of my blog archive and so I did.

collectingdata2

It amazes me then, that I could simply download an archive of these things that I’ve written years ago, and at the same time, it never occurred to me that I could feel such nostalgia in such a technological context. So using the blog archive I’ve downloaded from MySpace, I made an online zine (http://beverleyng.com/internetmonsters) in which I try to encapsulate this nostalgia, by juxtaposing these entries with some artworks I made at that time I wrote the entries (even my artworks then were made on the computer), paired with some screenshots of other virtual things that I was interested in then.collectingdata

This semester, I decided to take this project further by downloading the archive from my WordPress blog which I’ve been writing in for a long time. As I was downloading it and reworking them for a core module, I drew parallels with the various concepts that we have been discussing in class, as well as with the readings that we’ve done over the weeks. Beyond archiving entries, I am also interested to examine the various persons I’ve been throughout these years, and how these personas had been immortalized by words and kept in virtual space.

vmeo

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I’ve not quite decided yet how to carry out my final project. I might have been a bit lengthy on the basis of this project, though I would like to be very serious about it as I want to carry it further in terms of final year project. But this is what I have so far, do comment below if you have any feedback or suggestions!