dearrrrrrr data!

Today I was introduced to the work of Stefanie Posavec (Thanks Astrid!). I think this is most important thing I came across this week. I’ve been hitting a plateau of late, realising that I have a big bunch of concepts and data and not knowing what to do. So this came at the right time.

I was going to write a post this weekend about reducing things. I feel like I have a buffet of thoughts and references, and now it’s time to sit down and edit my research. I’ve decided to narrow it down to just analysing my blog data. I’m going to do away with the other things that I wanted to do, like remake my visual journals. I’m also going to explore ways that I can present my analysis in the outcomes I previously presented.

Here’s one that I came up with after class. I was going to do an illustrated piece on internet art and culture, but a part of my worries about the work being irrelevant, needless and appearing like I’m just doing a drawing for the sake of doing so. So Stefanie’s infographics really gave me an idea of how I can link the illustration with my concept.

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I’m inspired by the methods that Stefanie use to make her infographics and show that data can be represented in illustration, and not just some abstract shapes, lines or graphs. That really gave me an idea of how I can make my illustration a form of infographic too. Above is a quick sketch I made to express this idea. Over the following week, I’m going to collate my tags from my blog entries. The tags will be colour coded. Colours will be applied accordingly when I’m making my illustration, making a link between the composition of the work and the analysis of the data.

I think infographics will definitely take my work to the next level, and help make my project concept more concrete. Certainly achieved quite a bit during today’s FYP meet. If people ask me what my project is about, now I can say to them “I am deconstructing my blog.” Over the next week, I will write more about it and start making some stuff. Excited.. 😀

Research Critique 5: Shredder and Riot

 

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Shredder, 1998

 

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Riot, 1999

Mark Napier’s Shredder and Riot were alternative web browsers made in the 1990s. The main aim of these browsers was to deconstruct the webpage as it is conventionally viewed, by manipulating the underlying source code and re-presenting the data in their own elements. It is like taking apart a Lego sculpture and rearranging the bricks around.

In Rosa Menkman’s essay, she examines the beginnings of glitch art in sound culture:

The notion of glitch art was just crossing over from sound culture, and leaking into visual art culture only sporadically. Glitch more fully entered my vocabulary for visuals and networks when I began an artistic collaboration with the musician Goto80 (Anders Carlsson) in 2007. He explained to me how he exploited the Commordore64 sound chip for the creation of music. The bugs Goto80 used gave a very specific texture to the sound (the result of noise artifacts) and I began to develop and recognize visual equivalents to this process.

I feel that there is a textural element to both Shredder and Riot. The deconstructed website produces interesting outcomes.

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Take this screenshot from the Shredder browser, for example. The blue part is made up of the source code: the line height of these coding text have been tweaked drastically. The extreme condensing of these lines produces a solid area of blue, and some of the background elements peek through the spaces in between, creating an interesting, textural effect. The blurry, pixelated images look like marbled texture too. The outcome of these glitched elements look like a collage made by a machine.

In the Glitch Studies Manifesto, here’s a description of glitch art as a progressive art form:

4. Employ bends and breaks as metaphors for différance. Use the glitch as an exoskeleton for progress.

Find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and cracks; manipulate, bend and break any medium towards the point where it becomes something new; create glitch art.

Most of the works we discussed in recent weeks were artworks that were made with a piece of technology that is relatively new; artists who are keen to experiment with the purpose that these kind of technology have been designed for. Like Douglas Davis’s work The World’s Longest Sentence, Mark Napier’s Shredder and Riot were made in the late 1990s, when the Internet phenomenon was still rather young. It explores what can be done with the Internet browser than using it purely to surf the internet or to obtain information. Taking apart the surface of a website, “manipulating the medium”, was the creation of something new in the realm of something that is still new.

The machine no longer behaves in the way the technology was supposed to. Its glitching interface, strange sounds and broken behavioral patterns introduce tension into user intentions; an astonishing image (or sound) must be some how negotiated amidst a normally much more boring masquerade of human computer relations.

I also found this point very relevant to what the Shredder and Riot was designed to be like, particularly for Riot. The Riot browser really created this chaotic effect: elements of a webpage strewn all over, and the web page look really wild and crazy. If a user were to navigate a website using the Riot browser, it must have been quite an interesting experience, particular in that time, when websites looked simple and it was not diffucult to get around. A Riot-ed website probably would have made navigation way more interactive, with the user having to forage through this chaos to search for the links and to demystify text and images that have been layered over each other.

 

Glitch maker chance art

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I haven’t quite written anything about making chance art yet, but this weekend I think I’ll do some research and include a few more references for chance art. Last semester I fooled around with some glitch makers online and I got some pretty crazy results. I used a couple of the outcomes in the large Photoshop artwork, but I mostly used it as a starting point for glitch experiments.

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Made with image glitcher experiment

This online app manipulates a .jpg image, so that it creates all this weird, fancy errors. What I did was to play around with the sliders until I achieve some effect that’s quite nice: often it’s the colours that are produced, or how an area of the image is distorted. Then I make screenshots of the various results.

I’m currently doing bit more research into each area of my report as I work my way through the desired outcomes. A few days ago I had my meeting with Randall and we discussed making a longform WordPress theme. One of the girls in my fyp group, Boyan, is very good at making themes, so I thought maybe this time I’ll produce a sketch and rope in the help of someone who’s better at coding. To be honest, I think I will struggle quite a bit with learning the coding for WordPress theme. I don’t think it will be impossible for me to learn, or that I’ll not have the patience for it. But it has been a long time since I did any coding, and I quite look forward to working with Boyan to make something cool for the virtual part of my project.

While doing some reading on David Carson’s works, I wondered how he ever thought of making deconstructed typography. I feel that the experimental quality of his design is reminiscent of the Surrealist automatism concept. Automatism art taps into the subconscious mind of the artist, and allow that subconscious to work itself onto the paper. Sometimes I feel it is not as easy as it looks or seems, to create experimental artwork. It’s almost like meditation: you got to just kind of shut down a small part of your brain, and just make an artwork without really thinking about it. just go with the flowwwww~~

What I like about the image glitcher experiment is that it pushes that button: stop thinking! I glitched some body of text just to give me some visual ideas of what I can make, typographically, and then I can expand from there. I love this part of the work, definitely. Having no idea of the outcome can be an exhilarating thing, and from my experiences, is a pretty damn good!

To more experimenting!

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.

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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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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.

 

 

On being a Netartizen (Google)

Photo 14-8-15 8 11 29 amI think as part of a generation of active social media users, we are surely Net Citizens. But as creatives, how can we take a step further and use social media as a form of art? The Internet can be considered an artistic medium. Whether the outcome of the work is interactive or static, there are really endless things one can do with the Internet and to make artwork with it. I took this photo of a tshirt I saw a lady wearing on the bus a few days ago. It reminds me of how sometimes my friends and I joke that we don’t need boyfriends because Google knows everything. Looking at this tshirt design, I actually started thinking about how Google is a really powerful tool that has a lot of potential to be an artwork by itself.

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Here’s a screenshot I took when I key in the words “why am I” into the search bar. The predictions are very funny. It makes me think about how Google could be everybody’s confession box. These predictions are possible because of the popularity of these questions being asked, which if you think about it, is quite the result of a kind of networked practice by the whole world. (Clearly, everybody worries about being alone forever.)

Google’s products and services are becoming more interactive than before. They provide many opportunities for people to turn its uses into artistic mediums. Google Drive is a good example of collaborative practice. And there are already people out there who make artworks of of its services, like these postcards from Google Earth.

Millions of people use Google everyday, every hour, and unknowingly, they become an art collective of sorts as well as part of a post-modern commentary on our society and our way of life.

 

Holycrap: Till Death Do Us Part

 

Really enjoyed looking at the second famzine by Holycrap. This issue is particularly inspiring for me in terms of the way the contents are being presented. I have been busy scanning some of my journals and other little things. Looking at this work gives me many ideas on how I can present my data in a manner that is true to the medium. Most importantly, how can I capture the ephemeral quality of these things?

Holycrap had a sharing session at Deck two weeks ago and they talked about how the made the second zine. The second famzine is a tribute to the grandparents of Renn and Aira, a celebration of the older Lims’ 50th wedding anniversary. The cover design is an old Chinese National Language School folder, which was scanned and redesigned to fit the mini-books.Photo 16-8-15 11 39 52 am Photo 16-8-15 11 40 01 am Photo 16-8-15 11 40 07 am

Absolutely charming details being put into this work. Each copy of the zine is individually hand-stamped with the title of the work. And then the folder is intentionally “wrecked” and taped over to give the worn look. If you look closely, the yellow stains are actually scans from the actual folder. It is all very realistic. I’m interesting in going for this design approach with regards to my work because I think the data cannot be simply arranged on InDesign, printed, and that’s it.Photo 16-8-15 11 40 19 am Photo 16-8-15 11 40 24 am

Inside the folder is a 5-part book series with different chapters for their findings. What a brilliant and unique way of designing.Photo 16-8-15 11 40 32 am Photo 16-8-15 11 40 39 am Photo 16-8-15 11 40 45 am Photo 16-8-15 11 40 51 am Photo 16-8-15 11 40 53 am

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Mini (super realistic) replicas of ephemera makes for a very engaging and intimate experience when going through this work.Photo 16-8-15 11 42 05 am Photo 16-8-15 11 42 10 am Photo 16-8-15 11 42 17 am Photo 16-8-15 11 42 23 am Photo 16-8-15 11 42 28 am Photo 16-8-15 11 42 36 am Photo 16-8-15 11 42 41 am Photo 16-8-15 11 42 50 am

Holycrap: Google Translating Tokyoto

 

A good friend gave me the brilliant Rubbish Famzines by Holycrap. I’ve been looking through this over the last few weeks. These are some really inspirational work in terms of design and documentation which I will be looking at quite plenty for reference in the course of my FYP.

Holycrap is a local art collective made up of Pann Lim, Claire Lim, and their two children Renn and Aira. They have been making the Rubbish Famzines for two years now and recently launched their fourth famzine entitled “The Incomplete Herbarium and Other Garden City Exploits”.

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to listen to the family share about their project and how they work together to make these brilliant famzines. The family defines the famzines as a family magazine, a compilation of all that they find interesting and memorable to them as a family.

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Holycrap at DECK two weeks ago.Photo 16-8-15 11 43 22 am

Google Translating Tokyoto is the first famzine that they made in 2013. It is a brilliantly pink book documenting their first trip together as a family. Some pages from the zine.Photo 16-8-15 11 43 19 am  Photo 16-8-15 11 43 30 am

Incorporating screenshots, film photos and text.Photo 16-8-15 11 43 47 am

Never thought of it, but QR codes are actually a brilliant way of incorporating virtual content with print. During the talk, the family demonstrated the use of these QR codes, which leads to funny YouTube videos and Vimeo clips. Photo 16-8-15 11 43 55 am Photo 16-8-15 11 44 07 am Photo 16-8-15 11 44 13 am Photo 16-8-15 11 44 33 am

is this the real life

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first fyp post!

this is where it all begins. been spending some time converting my physical journals to digital formats. now i have my digital/physical archives all housed neatly in folders on my dropbox. it’s time to wade in and sieve through the contents. it’s going to be a massive project, but i’m looking forward to it!

Project Hyperessay 2: Concept & Teaser

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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.