“january” progress

no noo

I’m finished with tagging entries up till 2010, although only entries up to 2009 have been uploaded on the site so far. The rest are on the Textedit file on my computer. I’ve been working with really unstable network connection and it’s driving me up the wall. I think this is one of the drawbacks of moving your work around and doing it on the go.

Also, I am quite frustrated with the amount of spam comments that are generated by my blog, even more so with the fact that Akismet offers the service for a ‘minimal fee’. I went with the free option anyway, but it does not make sense to pay to get rid of spam comments.

On the website, you will see a grid image. It’s meant to be a filler image at the moment. I will be writing a WordPress theme for this website, something close to a sketch I made a while ago. The entries are available for viewing (under the read more tag). I am still interested to have the metadata as the narrative. You can see that my tag cloud is quite specific.

The next step for my project is to plot in the number of entries per category/tag into Google sheets and creating a skeleton for a visualisation using the charts.

I am also paying attention to how I feel as a result on embarking on this project. It didn’t make me feel good to look at my own writing and experience in such close detail. I have the same feelings when I worked on the ‘dictionary’ project last semester. At that point of time, I felt mortified at some of the entries. I become more aware of myself, and that some of my flaws have been apparent for a long time, and I may not have looked into them or addressed them at all. But this are more personal reflections of my project that I think I’m not ready to share right now, without going through a long story about the roots of my angst, etc. I’ve been writing down some of these reflections as I do my work, and I hope to put them together as part of the conclusion for the project. All of this is a work in a progress, my personal self, the project… at the end of the day, I would like to be able to look at this project and know that I have made something good out of what I’m not proud of.

 

visualising january: part one

 

 

This week we begin preparing for our final project for Facts & Fictions. I’m taking this opportunity to apply my newfound skills to my current project by visualising the entries from January over the period of 2005 to 2015 (January x 10). The amount of data over this period is a good size to work with for the final project (which will culminate in a group show in another 14 days), and I think it is a perfect chance for me to try visualising a part of my FYP.

These are some of my process shots:blogtagging01

Filtering entries from January 2005: there are 17 items, of which I am going to individually tag and categorise them. In 2005, I was still on Blogger, and the blogging platform is very simple, and I don’t remember tags or categories existing on Blogger then. So it was quite a good thing that my entries are left un-tagged/categorised, now I can be very specific about how I want to label the entries for the sake of this project.

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I am also doing tagcrowding again, with the help of Miriam Quick, who does research for information design. With her guidance, I learned how to use Tagcrowd in a more resourceful manner. She also taught me how I can use Google Sheets to my advantage, by showing me lots of cool stuff that can be done with Sheets. After running through my text in Tagcrowd, I went on to omit common words, and made a list of frequent words I use. This is different from individually tagging my entries, which I feel is something I would have to do manually if I really wanted to be specific about the topics that I wrote about, and I think there’s no shortcut to this part. Tagcrowding would be useful for highlighting linguistic details like: lingo, swearing, emotive words, and even names. This could be an interesting area to visualise on its own, so at the same time, I am also creating an additional dataset for that aspect.

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I’ve installed WordPress on my own site again, for this January project. Currently, there’s nothing fancy there yet, but I think the taxonomy is taking shape and I am very excited about it. I’ve just finished importing entries from January 2005. You can take a look at it as I update it with more January entries, although I must warn you that some of the entries are very juvenile. Please bear with my 13 year old self. Haha.

Overall, this whole process of creating the metadata is far less agonising that I expected it to be. Before embarking on the January project, I read through all the January entries in the ten years, which left me in a very sombre and nostalgic mood, but all of that is gone when I go all technical about the work. That really gave me an idea to write a reflection piece after I have completed making these datasets for my archive. It would be interesting to include in my process book.

I’ll share more when I finish making the datasets for each year, and also my process on how I will visualise everything.

 

data visualising techniques

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I found this website with a gallery of beautiful data visualising techniques, which (at last) gives me some ideas on how I can break down my data. I haven’t done much since recess week and am struggling with how to make use of my data. Tagcrowd is particular useful as I can take a look at the taxonomy of my blog posts, at a glance, from any period that I pick. So I don’t have to go through every single post to draw it out. It can be done, although it will be a feat because I’m not looking at book.

I think I have been putting it off for a bit because I got started with highlighting the text according to categories I made up and at one point I was like WHAT ?!?!?! and it was rather scary and overwhelming and I think I might not be able to continue doing for each and every post (I have 2,700 entries), and the content might become way too arbitrary to fit into just one or two categories. Also, going through what I have written when I was 13 was particularly embarrassing at times, even though I do take a step back and look at the text from a systematic point of view… still can be a struggle, because I did write them after all, and I’m not analyzing something that’s written by someone else or something that is purely fictional. I find this psychological part of doing this project something that I can also expand on, perhaps later, or as part of the process journal. The act of going through one’s journals and looking it from a third-person point of view.

Anyway, this is where Tagcrowd comes in handy for just sieving out words like “school”, “people”, “art”, just to highlight some broad categories immediately, and then under these umbrella of terms, I can then go into the entries and pick out some of the significant words I use to talk about these things.

I might start with some numbers for example, just to get me started. Just plain old figures. I got here a quick list I made just now:

  1. Number of words in my archive
  2. Total number of entries
  3. Post frequency
  4. Day of the week with highest posts
  5. Day of week with lowest posts
  6. Longest entry
  7. Shortest entry
  8. Number of exclamation marks used (Thought of this when I saw some particular angsty entries… ha ha)
  9. Number of swear words used (After the above)

Please let me know if you have more ideas 🙂

I can’t believe it took me a week to get this entry out. I’ve been feeling quite stuck and I have been bumming around. I should have just written this out. It got me out of the rut a little.

collecting data

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It’s not easy to work with data, I think, especially when I have absolutely no experience with it. Here’s what I got so far. I highlighted the text according to categories (school/self/etc). I’m not sure how I might go about deconstructing the text. I got a book about data visualising, so I’m currently reading through it.

Desired outcomes for FYP

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After the few weeks of preliminary research and accumulating all sorts of concepts and references, I think I might finally settle down on some big keywords at last. So my plan for this week is to work on my project report, locking down my desired outcomes for the project and making an FYP timeline.

Below is the list of outcomes with a brief description of the project.


 

</alienation>

This is a remake of the Calendar project made last semester.

  • a massive deconstructed typography project, using content from my blog
  • there will be ten mini books that will make up this project, each book made up of blog entries written in a single year.
  • each book to be a5 size.

t.e.x.t

  • a paper describing the nature of the project, and some of the writing I made last year about this exploration of archiving.
  • I thought it will be important to include this as it will be helpful to explain my reasons for embarking on such a project.
  • nothing big or fancy, just a booklet.

thisjournalsuitsme

  • this is a compilation of my visual journals

a picture

  • an illustration inspired by internet art and culture.

the infinity adventure

  • a web venture employing the use of longform storytelling
  • animated .gifs

 

Works from Venice Biennale

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I forgot the name of the artist who did these boxes, but I think this gives me an idea of how i can store the blog-rolls that I made last semester. One of the things that I would like to get started on and finish this semester is to think about how I can improve on that work.

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Peter Friedl’s The Diaries, 1981-2014

More than 300 closed notebooks are displayed in piles within specially designed museum showcases. The Diaries is an epic staging of real time, memory, volume, and text on paper. Thousands upon thousands of densely filled pages covering a period of over 30 years testify to the impossibility of capturing bare life in words. His diary installation is a study in narration and is open to change. As private books and authentic documents authored equally by professional writers and amateurs, diaries sit ambivalently on the threshold of literature and history. Their centuries-long tradition has given rise to many ways of constructing, documenting and revoking subjectivity. By blocking access to the contents of his enshrined, closed diaries, Peter Friedl invites the viewer to contemplate the multi-layered meaning of how aesthetic experience and imagination work. In an era of open access and ubiquitous surveillance, overabundant communication and information, the artist’s “real allegory” takes on critically new importance. It questions the power of display and imagination, the drama of form and content as well as the fragility of autonomy.

The Diaries plays with notions of the anachronistic, precarious, and unfinished. Yet Friedl’s installation subverts the myth of immediacy in order to offer an alternative composed of withdrawal, silence, and introspection. Simple, mundane activities such as reading and writing become tools and aids for potential resistance and emancipation.

As a visual prologue to the diary project, the exhibition will include a selection of Friedl’s own childhood drawings from the 1960s. Like the notebooks, the authenticating medium of the drawing can be experienced as a piece of material culture. — e-flux journal

This work is particularly relevant to my own work, definitely. The printed archive of my blog could be seen as the technological counterpart of collecting journals. Will be referencing this work in my report.

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samson kambalu

I have no real idea what this work is about. But I like the presentation of this one. Framed pictures are purposefully installed on the wall, against the text (an angry letter which was written quite humorously).

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.

 

 

Research: B Is For Bauhaus

Just read a book ‘B Is For Bauhaus’ by Deyan Sudjic. It’s a book about understanding contemporary culture and design.

Here’s some interesting things I found in the book that will be relevant to my report.

On our relationships with our possessions,

The collecting impulse is universal, and it goes on to the roots of what is it to be human. It pre-dates mass production and design, but it reveals the essential nature of our relationship with our possessions, how they communicate with us, and the various ways in which we value them. understanding the nature of collecting tells us something about ourselves as well as the nature of things.

To collect any object, we have traded in the original meaning and are looking for something else from them.

The journal is a repository of memories and events. These are also considered possessions. When I look at my archive again, I find myself looking for something else from the words and drawings that I’ve made over the years. Many times I draw the comparison between the person I am then, and now. These are markings that indicate my growth as a person and a creative.

We collect possessions to comfort ourselves, from addiction and to measure out the passing of our lives. We collect because we are drawn to the subtler pleasure of nostalgia for the recent past, and the memory of far-distant history. We collect sometimes to signal our distress and console ourselves in our inability to deal with the world. These are the motivations that designers need to understand, and the qualities which they manipulate when they create objects, whatever their nominal function.

I’m particular drawn to the point he made about distress and consoling ourselves. This year I hardly made any drawings. My journals are filled instead with writing that I made in order to try to understand my own FYP concept better. I also find myself grappling with the struggle of being with a young adult. Time and finance are the resources that have to keep competing with each other, and it makes me feel frustrated. I find that I must divide my time and attention each week to work commitments, FYP, and spending time with friends and family. I look at my older journals and I find that I lost the luxury to make the drawings and writings that I used to. I rarely have the time to feel bored anymore, each moment is dedicated to keeping up with my to-do list. I guess it’s one of the reasons why I needed to deactivate myself from social media. In becoming a young adult, some of these juvenile struggles have definitely (and thankfully) faded away, but along with that, I also lose the need to make artwork about these things. But that’s not to say that I need to be some kind of angsty youth to fuel my creative process. Looking at my journal archive also makes me realise that I sometimes need to not give a damn, and occasionally make some impulsive artwork that makes no sense. To think like a child again.

Collecting is in one sense about remembering, but the digital world never lets us forget anything. Paradoxically, it has also undermined our ability to remember. Our email and text trails will last as long as the server farms that have already conferred a kind of immortality on anybody with a Twitter account.”

This point is definitely relevant to the virtual part of my work. My project is split between my virtual and physical archives. It documents the relationships made online and off.

We remember where we started from online, because the date is recorded when we first made friends on the virtual realm. Green buttons tell me that I know you from a measurable distance. Conversations are trivialized with the advent of animated and very expressive egg man oyster cat girl stickers. Grids of photos let me glimpse into your life and I could say yeah I guess I know you. How many backspaces will it take to bring me back to when there were no green buttons? When your status is set to Away on MSN? Remember the time I told you I was playing The Sims and you told me how you got rid of your Sims? And then you said you were going to build some furniture for your room over the break. And then the conversation ended and the next time I went online there were no traces of the conversation happening. Despite being given a chance to keep an archive of the chat, nobody really goes to the effort to do so. And now we can go back as far as we wish to and point out the beginning of everything. Everything is laid out and easily accessible, pictures and words and the little green circle next to your name. Archiving comes easier for all of us, collecting data is as easy as typing hello to you. The question is how much of this is worth remembering and archiving. You may not remember, but the Internet remembers for you.

Holycrap: Renn Lim by Renn Lim

 

“Renn Lim by Renn Lim” is yet another one of Holycrap’s creative ventures. I really like how this little book is put together, it reminds me so much of my own journals and how I save little scraps of paper and other ephemera that I love a lot.

What I love about Holycrap’s design approach is that they have a very distinctive and original style. They work with what their large archive of material and make an aesthetic out of it. It is absolutely okay to be messy, or when things get stained. From the viewpoint of a book lover and a creative, I think that sometimes it is important to embrace some of the imperfections and make it a part of design. This book is an example of how elements of art, craft, and design can come together and complement each other perfectly, and make the experience of going through the book so pleasant. Books are meant to come in contact with our touch, dog-eared pages and stains are inevitable. Books should feel at home in our hands.

 

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Paper bits that are scanned, printed, and deliberately crumpled by hand.Photo 16-8-15 11 45 09 am Photo 16-8-15 11 45 19 am Photo 16-8-15 11 45 24 am Photo 16-8-15 11 45 30 am Photo 16-8-15 11 46 37 am

Super adorable and amazing replica of the envelopes from photo shops. I laid an actual one next to it for comparison. It even folds up like the real thing. Inside the envelopes are small prints of Renn’s paintings.Photo 16-8-15 11 46 44 am Photo 16-8-15 11 46 55 am Photo 16-8-15 11 47 15 am Photo 16-8-15 11 47 21 am Photo 16-8-15 11 47 53 am Photo 16-8-15 11 47 54 am Photo 16-8-15 11 47 56 am

Instadiaries

 

 

 

 

My friend said this to me lately, “Beverley, when I look at your Instagram, you don’t seem to have photos of you and your friends. You make others think that you are better off living life by yourself, with your objects and whatever it is you are making.”

It was a timely thing to hear that from her, as I recently rediscover an old project that I made some time ago called Instadiaries. I made it when I started clearing my iPhone camera roll and found that there are many images I’ve captured which I had intended to share on my Instagram but I didn’t, because they didn’t fit in with the rest of the pictures I had already posted.

I would say this project makes me think about my participation on the virtual space and how that affects my way of documentation over recent years. When I write on my personal blog, I always feel that I am making conversation with a virtual abyss, and I never really feel that I had to censor myself or curate my words. If I were unhappy with myself, I could be very honest about what it is that made me unhappy and then I will read what I wrote again the following day and I could make a change about myself. I know there is not really anybody out there who is a constant reader of my blog. People are generally more interested in the pictures shared on Instagram or Facebook. But when I share a photo on my Instagram, I know that people do look at it and respond to it. And because I know it isn’t an entirely complete representation of who I am, sometimes I would rather not share at all.

Maybe some of us have experienced this phenomenon that seem to have taken over the users of Instagram at some point. We become quite particular about the way our pictures look on Instagram. Some users prefer to keep the original aspect ratios of their photos, square crops be damned. Some are really good at doing flat lays and enjoy arranging objects in a neat, stylish fashion to demonstrate their taste. The list goes on. There is nothing wrong with this, and some users have an attractive feed for their specific interests because of their careful curation. At one point, I was also very particular about how my pictures look together on Instagram, which made me wonder why I should. It is quite pretentious and honestly there were plenty of pictures that I would like to share online but I didn’t. I thought of how people enjoy the feed that I was sharing then, and something different might make them disinterested. More than that, I was ashamed to admit that I could allow social media to influence my decision in something so trivial such as sharing a photo I like a lot. So, as a result, I deleted my Instagram for a while, and made a project about it.

I collated some of my favourite photos taken in a month (the project unfortunately lasted for only about three months), and added some of the writing I made in the month as well.

Some pictures of the project:

 

 

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Each Instadiary is A4 size, printed on both sides on Ikea paper.Photo 16-8-15 11 34 38 am Photo 16-8-15 11 34 54 am

Some poor experimentation of layout.Photo 16-8-15 11 35 00 am Photo 16-8-15 11 35 16 am Photo 16-8-15 11 35 25 am Photo 16-8-15 11 35 30 amI think this could be something I can continue to look into. I’m not so much interested in the implications of social media or looking deep into how that affects our relationship with one another, but I am definitely keen on researching how that affects the way we look and present ourself. I also want to make comparisons between this manner of sharing with what I started wit: blogging and making friends on Internet forums.