creating my own system – part 2

march–may 2015

you say you do not sense any kind of resentment from me. i like to think that’s pretty good. comparatively, someone once told me that all she could see was that my work is so full of resentment. that’s not great. that was eight years ago.

i am very lucky to love what i love to do. it made me more aware of myself and gives me hope and courage to not be a culmulative mess of my past self(ves). i console myself with the knowledge that i am getting better at doing this.

this project is about remixing existing histories and playing on the idea of reworking and filtering to give new meanings to old identities. a massive photoshop job, a work-in-progress, a painstaking filtering of flaws, to re-present the self, to rework flaws, to conceal and reveal, to give new meanings to old identities.

it’s about being self-aware. can i stand being this fucking mess?

gifs captures moments of transitions

digital technology, data mashups

filters and edits to re-present feelings and reality in an approachable way, which is what draws the line between personal narrative/struggle/angst and wanting to be relatable (viewing work critically)

internet nostalgia and attachment, ‘to form relationships over the internet, to live life and memories over the internet where everything is immediate gratification and can be replayed over and over’

unprepared again. don’t know how to explain my mind. this paralysis is getting worse. i liken this state to being dumped at the gates that opened to the darkest corner of my mind.

due to the nature of such work, we will be conveniently categorised and classified under the stereotype of the tortured, anguish artist. it is no romance being one such artist, causing hurt and confusion to those around us.

you say that people will gradually see the bigger picture of ourselves and even we needed to do that for ourselves, and not focus on this one part that failed. i wanted to tell my best friend, but i coulnd’t anymore i guess. it’s not the same anymore. it’s uncool to harp on such things, but i’ll have to just keep these things in me. i’m going to pack up my bags, carry on moving forward, no matter how long it takes.

all of these words made sense when they came out of your lips, and they lose their meaning when i rewrite them in my book.

july–october 2015

documenting work as a reveal of my thinking, as person and artist

have faith in your audience

my process describes the work more, opening up the process, trying to see what you don’t see.

not guarding information but making it open (for what)

mark napier, the shredder

douglas davis, world’s largest collaborative sentence

my collection of personal documentation is important in allowing me to understand my artistic practice and my development as an individual. this project aims to break down my writing and documentation and use it as a form of analysis in trying to understand the value of documentation in this age

bildungsroman as a concept, a coming of age story

jodi.org

technology is an invasive element, a fetish in the pursuit of perfection. can be a radical gesture

intangible heritage

ten years on the internet: the blog. an activity i have been doing for the longest time. documents my teenage years actively, particular the struggles i go through as an adolescent. how that shapes my being and identity and come to my present self, my artistic self and how that changed my perspective on how others see me

creating my own system – part 1

Some writing collected over the past year that I haven’t shared yet.

Trying to integrate my personal voice into the formal structure of the report as I feel that having that honesty is crucial to my work.

I know it is important to be able to write about your own work critically, but I have been struggling with how I can present it in a way that’s meaningful and thoughtful. So I am trying to create a ‘system’ where I attempt to reformat some of this writing that’s a little more personal and present it in a different way, from the same perspective that I view and live my own life right now, as someone who is developing an personal identity that does not suggest any struggle that I’ve been through.


january – february 2015

i should learn to express myself better. haven’t been thinking. i continually make poor conversations.

new year resolutions 2015: 1) avoid being sad/emotional. i say avoid because it is impossible to stop, but prevention is better than cure, they say. 2) draw more. 3) make an effort to document shit, even the bad shit. 4) stop using my phone so often. nobody could be that desperate to talk to me. 5) look at more books. 6) touch more books. 7) create more stuff. 8) take more photos. 9) listen to more music. 10) save some money

‘sometimes you don’t always know what you’ve got’ – wayne white.

‘the problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. eventually you become stale. if you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. to replenish, to give away. the more you give away, the more comes back to you’ – paul arden

i am feeling so terribly right now because i know all of this is contributing to an investment that will seek absolutely no returns. how will it feel to lose your life savings at one go, same again, however little there is, losing all that yet again. i think this is a feeling i really cannot feel again, you know. i could not imaging the other reality again.

jean jacques rousseau: the romantic reaction, the general will, the development of the inner voice.

shutting down: is it possible to not feel anything? to acknowledge feelings, but not actually feeling it. yesterday for a short while, i lay crippled once again on my bed, unable to move forth with anything. i really needed to shut down. i really want to think about how i can deal with the issue of being alienated, the lack of reciprocation, and finding a place to belong.

i look back at my journals and i thought why am i not writing as much as i used to, but then i think i wrote a lot because i feel unnecessarily. there are certain traits i want to find in myself again. i used to sit at tables, writing the things that i only recently realised were the basis of me being an alien. it is kind of depressing when you discover such truths of yourself through the things you write, many years ago.

i am filled with  a million thoughts, thoughts i already had for quite some time, all making their way to this physical space. this feeling is rather repulsive, revealing. i can call it whatever i want. above all, it is this feeling of alienation. why does it consistently happen to me.

it was a melancholy humour, and consequently a humour very hostile to my natural disposition, produced by the gloom of the solitude into which i had cast myself some years ago, that first put into my head this daydream of meddling with writing. and then finding myself entirely destitute and void of any other matter. – michel de montaigne

“messy, this collection of recollections” – david levithan, the realm of possibility
year after year, i return to this book. again and again. the review at the back of the book says ‘all teenagers will find themselves, their relationships, and their attitudes toward life, love and the pursuit of happiness somewhere in this poems.” through these years i turn to this book like a textbook of sorts, turning to it for answers and for some sort of reasoning as to why things happen the way they do, why i react the way i do, and more importantly, was there any way i could stop any of these things. and the answers were the same, over and over – to forget, to let go. all these years of documenting it was a process journal of remembering while forgetting.

i wanted to ask you, you who are reading this now, how do you feel? did you feel the same way too? did things get better for you? what are the books you read, and do they speak for you the way they did for me?

this morning i thought, people cannot mourn the losses of what they have not gained. empowered by this thought, it helps me to pull through today. and tomorrow.

it’s amazing, i have been doing this for years.

the nature of personal voice

unedited

self–portrait of words

using the internet as a time capsule, an archive. specifically using my blog as a source for this time capsule project – a very long narrative

why do i use the internet? i want to examine how the internet can be used as a form of archiving – also, i have a lot of material up there. it’s also about charting emotional and character change. it is about reconciling with the negative experiences of being an adolescent.

from blast/counterblast:

– ‘loose networks/data platforms. with networks come a new meaning: entrepreneur and cosmopolitan character. people today can boast of being both an insider/DIY at the same time’ – lane relyea

– you – non-artist, artist, artist who defies labels, doesn’t make typical art, uncategorisable and nomadic. hacker of culture and poet of everyday life. you are a romantic but we need less romanticism. otherwise we look past the fact our sense of social structure.

– art is for empathy – empathy is for the reduction of suffering. that’s why we always justified being artists.

– perpetually arrested adolescent dream. is it because i am able to hang onto moments of my adolescent keening that i can still at least occasionally find some company and solace in this circles of confusion? – mike hoolboom

the thoughts of 2am are so horrid, sometimes do not wish to entertain them at all. the moment they end up as a word, whether on paper or virtual space, they become branded onto the cruel face of reality.

from e-flux journal, what is contemporary art:

– the vacuum created by the sudden arrival of freedom and the possibilities it seemed to offer. hans richter, dada artist/historian on the experience of dada

– disbelief: from comrades of time by boris groys

when we begin to question our projects, to doubt or reformulate them, the present becomes important. it’s because the contemporary present is constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision, by the need for prolonged reflection.

– mass art consumption: practice of self-documentation has today become a mass practice and obsession.

– as time passes and we grow more into the contemporary, the reasons for remembering other times grow, while the ability to recall them weakens. memory straddles this paradox. we could say the ethics of memory have something to do with the urgent negotiation between having to remember (which sometimes include the obligation to mourn) and the requirement to move on (which sometimes include the need to forget). both are necessary and each is notionally contingent on the abdication of the other, but life is not led by the easy rhythm of regularly alternating episodes of memory and forgetting, cancelling each other out in a neat equation that resolves itself and attains equilibrium.

it can be crazy and shit, but it’s okay, because it’s all in my head. then the written, physical record is the censored version, the one i am allowed to put out there.

how long will i take to document my documentation? i think it will take a real long time. taking into consideration that i must be at times overwhelmed with the wave of nostalgia and loss. not sure what i lost, actually. time, maybe. i am sure i still keep whatever that keeps me going, and kept me writing.

if you had to put a timeline of your life how would you do it?

reading journals is a pretty scary process, sometimes tapping into things i may not want to know about myself

i also discover things i wrote since young that i still believed in (i am a person with a really weird character. i really doubt i would have any relationships when i grow up)

music and books influenced the way i think, adding on my already negative perception of myself.

things do get better

alone is my partner, an apt companion for me. you must think i am too good for anyone or to be with anyone. that’s not it. again i must stress, the alternative isn’t all that great for me.

a stranger-girl said to me just now – why do you write in your journal? don’t you think by archiving, by recording, you aren’t really living in the moment?

i spent so much of my time writing about people and things, observing, obsessing but in reality, i don’t know anybody at all.

i think i also spend a lot of my time reasoning, it seems there’s nothing i could do or say without having a reason.

to be honest i don’t know how to describe the feeling of going through my archives. it does leave me more quiet than usual. thoughts are busy and have not found their way onto the pages. did i cry. no.

we are often not aware of the changes we go through until we read our archives.

how is this ten years worth of digital documenting important? what did i truly cared about? what am i actively purging now, and what did i feel?

i was drawn to the word ‘alone’ written in your book. lol, alone. i decided i couldn’t hate you anymore. you and your stupid book and stupid pen and overpriced analog camera and the way you tap on her shoulders. she says to me a few days ago, “sometimes, i forget that you are still a student”. i know right. i am so resigned to the fact that i am an alien.

overwhelmed by the writing of years before, i was unable to do any reflection for a while. i have no choice but to look at it from a different standpoint. as unemotional, humourous and objective as possible.

‘you are so different’ is the one phrase i do not want to hear again ever in my life. having been to the darkest corner in my world and back, nothing fazes me anymore.

to remember is to impede being fully in the present and to thwart moving forward. to pause over the past is to be intolerably encumbered, to dwell on yesterday is pointless indulgence and to think historically is to sink into pitiable paralysis – tk sabapathy

In order to talk about the biggest, most defining things, one may need to return to the smallest of situations. They say that youth is about increasing one’s territory, a search for vastness, while adulthood is about sieving out the expanse, and returning home.

loss of idealism

talking to my online friend reminds me a lot of mark whom i used to write about many years ago. we certainly have the same things in common. bounded by our longing for real-life friends and for that virtual life we lived voraciously in before. i could hardly think now that can exist in my life again. tired of building shit over an invisible line. or any live, really. it’s so easy to hide under the blanket of critique that surrounds our social habits today. being the social alien that i am/could be, i am perhaps mistaken for my dedication to my virtual social life, that stops me from participating actively in real life social situations. they will possibly not know i already lived a large part of my life that way. the virtual life is not like the way it used to be.

forward. met an acquaintance from my past a while ago. what a coincidence. to reacquaint yourself with histories is not easy. the only way to live is to move forward and never looking back.

perhaps many many many years later i may bump into you again on the street, in my grandmother dresses, that it may occur to you at last that i am a girl.

defining my online self (heroine’s descriptions)

how all of this is a progression and development of self. reinstates the idea of an ever changing self-portrait and life as a process journal.

why do i choose bright colours for my publication> it is letting go, a celebration

this project also examines the concept of nostalgia in a virtual form (physical relics vs virtual relics)

alienation sums up my whole project, i am a perpetual loner and because of this i had all the time in the world for this work that i’ve produced

rework these emotions into something worthwhile. to make sense of darkness, of nostalgia. a presentable melancholy, a celebration.

internet ephemera.

glitch art, embracing errors as part of the virtual experience. the fleeting nature of these short lived faults is similar to the experiences noted in my journals and blogs.

the feeling of saturation and overwhelming and translating that in neon colours. as part of a distinctive identity that does not suggest any struggle. as i mature as an artist i find myself able to form a vocabulary and aesthetic that hints at the opposite of all i have suffered.

an endless, irritable, pathetic pursuit that makes me churn out these writing.

the sadness i had when i threw her table out of the back door in the container class, the times i sat outside the room with all sense of self, all dignity and self respect down the drain, unaware, uncaring, of the general public that is subjected to see that self, infinitely uglier than i perceive myself to be. the good thing is that i learned early. all of this is past, and you will no longer look at this again one day and remember anything, except that you have moved on.

invisible monsters – chuck palaniuk:
– now, you are going to tell me your story. just like you did. write it all down. tell that story over and over. tell me your sad assed story all night. when you understand that what you are telling is just a story, it isn’t happening anymore. when you realise the story you are telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in trash can then we will figure out who you are going to be.

– you have to keep recycling yourself.

can we live by screenshots and let a nondescript typeface by the mouthpiece for our thoughts?

google sheets

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 6.47.30 pm

In the past month, I’ve worked a lot with Google Sheets. It helps me to organise my categories and tags easily.

Due to the scale of the project and the personal, arbitrary nature of journal entries, it can be tedious and tricky to build the database of tags and categories. Here’s how I tagged my entries.

– Tags: subject matter, activity, event, names

After a review of my Sheets, I am on the fence about using Categories as part of the database narrative. Categories are more general than tags, which can be very specific, and as a rule, I categorised my entries based on the general tone/subject matter of the entry, which can be quite tricky because as I’ve said, entries can be arbitrary. I thought about how my dataset could work for me and I find that tags may offer a better solution. A combination of say, tags + time, will project quite interesting visualisations, and definitely more effective as well. Categories would become an extra set of variable, and because they can look rather similar to tags, it would be really confusing too.

Here’s an overview of my Sheets. This is from January 2005 – 2015. There’s a lot of cleanup to be done, for sure.

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 6.47.34 pm

Sorting of Categories.

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All the tags, before they are sorted. Tags in the colour columns belong to a bigger category, while those on the left side are more specific.Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 6.47.39 pmScreen Shot 2015-12-18 at 6.47.41 pmFor my Facts & Fictions final, I narrowed down the categories and tags and worked with these.Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 6.47.43 pmScreen Shot 2015-12-18 at 6.47.48 pm

Sketches of my visualisation, using Google Sheets.

 

learning with stefanie posavec: day 2

thumb_IMG_8649_1024Today we learn how to visualise data. Some basic techniques are introduced, as well as some general rules of thumb as a guideline.thumb_IMG_8652_1024  thumb_IMG_8651_1024

Using statistical knowledge to work with design. Looking for an overarching conclusion may help make your work more meaningful. Patterns and rhythms in data can be translated visually – using various methods like analog, coding, etc.

Have a spreadsheet! Use Google sheets. It helps you to identify patterns.

Take notes on what you find: rate of change, hierarchal relationships, and so on. Get to know your data.

Select your focus. Form your message, find the highlight.

Assign visual variables to data (shape, tonal values, texture, orientation of a line, etc)

IMG_8662  IMG_8660 IMG_8659

Stefanie highlights the elements that makes for a strong data visualisation:

  • Good architecture + arrangement
  • Annotate appropriately: labels, legend, titles, axis, units, sources, attributes.
  • Don’ts: improper scaling, truncated axes, differences in perspectives (particularly in 3D visuals)
  • 3 to 8 groups or categories is good enough to communicate

IMG_8658

This form of visualisation is the basis for her style of visualisation: the node link tree diagram. It’s good to research on data visualisation styles to give you a headstart.

IMG_8674

IMG_8673

Do a sketch first: how it works, then add graphical elements, and then annotations.

IMG_8665 IMG_8664 IMG_8663

Critiquing bad data visualisations: it should not be too confusing.

Lastly: some methods to organise data:

  • grouping information according to location (geo-spatial data)
  • alphabetical order
  • time
  • category (comparing categorical values)
  • hierarchy (relationship between entities)

Jacques Bertin’s visual variables

Gestalt laws of grouping.

That’s all for today! We are to work on an individual project for this program as well. I won’t be using my FYP for this due to the time constraint of the program. I’ll share more as I go along.

 

data visualising references + progress

datavis01 datavis02 datavis03

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.

data visualising techniques

data03

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

data01

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.

Micro-Project: Glitched Abberations

These experiments were really fun to make. The results are all really unpredictable. I chose a variety of images (slightly overexposed, dark, greyscale, etc) to edit and see what effects I can achieve from the experiment. I took screenshots each time I make an edit to the text file, so here are some of the process shots. I’m glad I took the screenshots because the end result were so different from the saved .jpg, when I go back to Photoshop to save them. Still interesting results, nonetheless!104grrb01

I started off by editing only the top part of the code, which seem to break the image into monochromatic layers. I like the result of this one, it really transform the original image into something quite exciting.103grrb02

The colours in this photo is rather flat and faded. For the next image, I scrolled down all the way to the bottom and edited the code there. The effect was comparably drastic to the first: after a second edit, the image became a series of lines. The lines were also quite flat, nothing very saturated, like the original photo.55grrb04

Next, I tried a greyscale photo. The result is absolutely exciting.  It’s quite interesting to see how this one produced such a colourful results. My favourite part is how the glitchy lines, after rounds of edits, became a smooth streak of gradient.28grrb06

This is one of the more exciting result out of all the images I’ve tried. It has the same result as the greyscale photo; both have streaky gradient glitch lines, but what is interesting is how at one point of the edit, the “glow” of the text seemed to be separated from the text itself, creating a ghostly glitchy effect. It kind of reminds me of what you can do with slow shutter speed on a camera.38grrb05

This one looks like a 3D image. After the first edit, the result didn’t seem to change too much, the image just separates into different segments.

Here are the images opened in Photoshop:glitchab01 glitchab02 glitchab03 glitchab04   glitchab07

These experiments were surely exciting, but as with experimental art, sometimes I ask myself, when is it complete? I try not to over-do the glitching as a result of being encouraged by a previous outcome, because I’ve gone through a few images that became totally ‘destroyed’, and previous outcomes couldn’t be ‘saved’. Anyway, after I opened them in Photoshop, I realised they are all different from my desired outcome. Perhaps this is the nature of chance aesthetics.

WordPress Theme Sketch

Theme URL: http://bever-gif.com/theme/

This theme aims to present data in a single-page, long form manner. The data is my blog entries from 2005-2015, which I’m currently breaking down and building the tags by hand. (literally!) I would call this an experimental theme, that does not aim to function as a working theme, where new entries can be added and viewed. The theme uses existing WordPress widgets and the structure of the blog as an interactive way of presenting information. This is what I hope to achieve in the virtual part of my work. 

Here’s the outline of the theme:

(Note: this sketch is meant to be as simple as possible. My aim is to try and work out the function, before I add in the visuals.)

calendar

calendar

At the top of the theme is a calendar. Think of this as the big cloud that holds all the entries together, from various years. The entries are grouped in months rather than years, for example: January 2005, January 2006, January 2007, etc. The months are links: upon clicking them, more specific entries will show up.

month

month

Let’s take October for example. When October is selected, a tag cloud will show up.

tagcloud

tagcloud

The cloud describes the topics that are written in this month, over the years. This is the key feature of this theme as the tag cloud is an overview of how the content in my blog have progressed in the span of the time I’ve been writing it. A click on the tag will bring up even more specific entries.

tag

Let’s select the word ‘computer’. The theme will then list all the entries written about ‘computer’ in October, over the years.

years

years

When a specific tag is highlighted, it will list the years with this topic. *I forgot to add, but next to the year, there should be a number that displays the amount of posts.

entries

entries

Upon clicking the year, the entries will finally show up.

 

blogspot.jodi

jblog_01 jblog_02 jblog_03

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.