Eduardo Recife

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Eduado Recife is a total collage god. I’ve followed his work for about ten years now, and he inspired me a lot when I was making my old websites. I tried so hard to copy his style. It was so fun to be able to make these collages on the computer.

His collages and illustrations include a lot of old-fashioned stock images and vintage magazine cut-outs. The screenshots above were older versions of his website. He used to change them quite a bit, and I look forward to visiting his website each time, and then run off to make something inspired by his new things.

What I like about his work is that, like David Carson, he really plays with type. Working so much with collaging also inspired the way he viewed type, and he created a bunch of ‘deconstructed’ typefaces. His new website is much cleaner now, and easier for people to view his works, but he used to make longform websites too. I can’t find any of that on Google now.

Collage is often a big, experimental mess. But what I learn from Eduardo Recife’s work is that white spaces and minimalism is possible too. When he shrinks down some of this collages and place them right at the edge of the screen, it becomes quite an interesting visual experience.

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These are some of his new works which I also enjoy:

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Longform websites: kinetic.sg

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(images from Kinetic.sg, mute your computer if you are opening the link, the sound is a bit loud)

 

This is the homepage of local creative group Kinetic. I really like their approach to design, and I feel they definitely stand out from the rest of the prominent design groups in Singapore. That’s not to say that the rest are not good or anything, but I feel that Kinetic brings something different to the table.

Their homepage is a pretty excellent example of what I hope to achieve for the virtual part of my work, using the idea of longform storytelling to bring together different media in one place.

In terms of design, there are some grungy elements that I like a lot. The whole page looks like a photocopied creation, and it’s interesting to see how they bring this style to the virtual, and incorporate javascript and animated things to create such an engaging website. I love websites like these: it invites you to scroll down and look at each and every part closely. This is why I want to use the longform method as well. I think of it as entering a deep, fantastical forest that you just keep on walking through. (Think I’ve been watching too much Adventure Time.)

 

 

Final Project sketch: beverley.tv

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Here’s a draft outline of my final project:

Title: beverley.tv (might change this as my project progresses…)
Description: An internet TV channel broadcasting web episodes, documenting my life on the computer, by sharing the computer screen publicly.

main ideas

  • documentary style web episodes (webisodes) of what I do online/offline
  • using Quicktime’s screen recording function to capture footage from my desktop.
  • each webisode can focus on a specific topic, for example: how to waste time, how to get shit done… etc.

influences

Jon Cates, Bold3RRR

I have a renewed appreciation for this work. Last semester I was still quite baffled by the idea. But I have a better idea of it now and following the discussion in class, I am also quite inspired by the idea of desktop sharing as a form of communication and personal documentary.

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Modern Family, Connection Lost 

I watched this over the break while catching up on my TV shows, and I was rather surprised by this episode. The whole story took place on the desktop of one of the characters, Claire. It shows how she uses various apps like Facetime, Mail, Safari, to communicate with her family while in transit at an airport. It is refreshing and fascinating to see how the desktop can be used to tell a story, and that is used for such a popular and mainstream TV show.

 

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Adventure Time, A Glitch Is a Glitch

This episode of Adventure Time also incorporates the glitch as part of the story, and the whole episode is designed to be “glitched”. The character designs looked raw and deconstructed, and the landscape reveals the grid work. I thought it is interesting because in this episode, the “glitch” was a kind of monster than the main characters Finn and Jake must help to destroy, and having the environment set up like that creates a sense of authenticity.

A common idea that I can derive from these pieces of work and apply to my own final project is that it really exemplifies the term ‘virtual reality’ at its most literal definition. It is a face of reality that follows the movement of a user’s click and touch on the computer. This method of storytelling, if I can call it for my work, can be a mix of thrilling, engaging and entertaining.

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In terms of content, I am not sure what it is I will be presenting in my webisodes just yet. I’m making use of Quicktime’s screen recording function to make 10 minute videos of myself working on the computer, everytime I am online and doing something. For starters, I will make some videos first, and then once or twice a week I will look through what I’ve recorded and then sieve out some potentially interesting segments to put together.

outcome

The final project involves some live streaming. For the live streaming part, I will perhaps just show whatever is on my screen while I go on to do stuff. But I will have some pre-recorded segments made, just to give viewers some context about the work and what it is about. This can be a couple of pilot episodes I think, just to get it started.

For example, one episode can be dedicated to getting distracted online. Then I’ll look through the footage captured each week and sieve out the bits that captured me when I am trying to do work, but command+tab to another screen to look at lame youtube videos or chatting with my friends. Something like that. I think it might kind of be funny.

 

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.

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.

Video Double — virtual nostalgia

My video double is a work in progress of an alter ago. This lady is pretty much my ideal self, I think, as an artist, as a personality. She’s got some fun tattoos and beautiful hair. The illustration style is largely inspired by the aesthetics of Palace Doll avatars (from Palace Chat, briefly discussed in Media & performance class last semester), as well as Microsoft Paint. These are some things that influence my early artworks made on the computer, so I wanted to capture a bit of what I remembered and loved, like going crazy with the colour wheel and adding all the colours on my digital palette. Palace Doll avatars were really some stellar pixel artwork. And Microsoft Paint was my virtual art studio before I ever got to play with Photoshop.

Research Critique 1: The Way of OSS and the OSS Artist

Nam June Paik — Electronic Superhighway (1974)

How might the Open Source system of sharing & collective narrative be a creative inspiration and approach for artists?

We can think of open source as a tool/medium for new ways of expressing ourselves as creatives in this postmodern time. Open Source’s encouragement and endorsement of sharing, and its collaborative methods of exchanging information and ideas is a kind of gateway for new genres of art-making. The essay “The Open Source Artist” draws example from the works of Nam June Paik, and his manipulation of the video and television set in his artworks. This is similar with the OSS’s artist approach in the sense that it is currently a significant concept in the age of information technology. Using and appropriating the use of OSS in our art making in our time is similar to Nam June Paik’s use of TV and moving images as it was the popular/prevalent form of technology at the time.

Another point in the essay that resonated with me is that the Web provides the artists immediate and accessible platform for showcasing creative work. The Web’s open concept provides anybody with a chance to be try to be an Internet celebrity, for example. The accessibility of these concepts give people a chance to push themselves creatively. People are also able to easily own a piece of virtual turf, by buying a web-host. cPanel could even be perceived as a new form of artist studio. One is able to reach out for many open sourced materials out here to make virtual artworks of their own: such as scripts, source codes. Even video tutorials that teaches you these things are made easily available and often at no charge. This is one of the benefits of working creatively in an OSS environment.

In the essay, “The Way of OSS”, the Internet is referred to as an Open Source repository. As an avid user of Dropbox, I can really relate to this concept. The “cloud” concept is similar to open source, as it encourages and aids creatives in collaborative working. It is also mentioned that the OSS community is marginalised, but the products of some OSS projects have definitely serve to improve millions of people in all areas of their lives, whether they are creatives or not.

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.

 

Research Critique V: Webcam Mediated Communication

Before the YouTube personality existed, there was JenniCam. Jennifer is a true Internet personality, even before the term was used extensively. The project JenniCam offers viewers uninhibited views into Jennifer’s private world. In Steve Dixon’s essay on webcams as surveillance, he defines the webcam as a kind of “documentary realism” which is very relevant to what Jennifer is doing with her webcam. This realism involves uncensored views into her world, capturing footages that ranges from the mundane to the sexual. Raw footages like this are unedited and shared publicly with an unknown audience.

JenniCam is an important example that illustrates this idea of vulnerability and authenticity expressed in Annie Abraham’s essay:

“In a society where authenticity and privacy become endangered it is important to find ways to access our vulnerabilities and doubts, to make them public, to cherish our messy side. We need to make space for the beast in the beauty, to go back to reality, to claim the human. “We need to trap reality in order to make it available for thought.”

Indeed, the JenniCam archives must be quite an interesting collection of personal history for Jennifer. Her willingness to be so open in capturing herself in moments that are usually very awkward for most of us to face (like pleasuring herself sexually, or not having makeup on the face, looking extremely messy and plain sometimes) is a daring move in attempting to record her daily life down to these raw and vulnerable details. This authenticity also gives the JenniCam project a sort of endearing quality even, in the realm of Internet personalities and virtual fame. I would like to illustrate this point by referring to the idea of webcam falsities and fictions. JenniCam begin merely as a form of communication between Jennifer and her mother, so her mother could see what she was up to in her dorm at school. Jennifer’s deadpan honesty about the practical use of her webcam and her declaration of not being “an entertainer” gives the project a very real and human quality that sets her apart from many webcam/virtual personalities that soon follow after her.

 

w r now[here]: Cyberformance critique

Having a chance to participate in this cyberformance is definitely one of the highlights of Media and Performance class. By being the key performers of this segment in the symposium, we can better understand some of the concepts illustrated in class regarding performance art and the third space.

w r now[here] allows us to work with a real cyber performance artist, Helen Varley Jamieson. Rehearsals and preparations were connected through Adobe Connect, in true virtual fashion. For two weeks, we went through rehearsals using our mobile phones, testing webcams and our connection settings. Even though the performance takes place online, it is also crucial to take into account real-life circumstances. One of the most important points to take note during our performance was not to show our faces or to show each other. Taking that into consideration, my classmates and I had to make sure that our starting point, the “nowhere” are relatively far away from each other. There were a few of us situated at every level and corner of the school. Eventually, we have to meet in the lobby to slowly make our way to the theatre. This part of the performance was rather tricky as we were already gathered in a group. Yet, we took care to remain out of each other’s viewfinders. It is quite fun and required some improvisation: some of us pointed our cameras to the ceilings, some focused on other people in that area, and then some of us kept our cameras focused on one object. I think we succeeded in this area, after looking at our performance on Vimeo.

Another key point to note is definitely the technical difficulties faced. The university network was down just minutes before the performance was to go live, and we had a little collective moment of panic. Thankfully, the technical situation was fixed quickly. During our rehearsals and our mobile cam exercises that led up to the performance, we also encountered various technical failures such as unable to log in to Adobe Connect. Fortunately, all of us performers were located in the same space during the day of the performance and we made use of the same connection during the actual performance, so we didn’t have these issues.

One important takeaway from this performance was my understanding of some of the artworks discussed in class. For weeks, we discussed about cyborgs, the body as an instrument, the telematic embrace and the third space. One of the works I critiqued in this class was Robert Whitman’s American Moon. After the performance, I felt I could understand Whitman’s work better. Here’s a description of the work from the syllabus page:

“Whitman created a multi-dimensional theater environment that gave viewers differing perspectives on action taking place in a central theatrical area.”

I would liken the sectioning of the audience in Whitman’s work to our webcams during the performance, especially during the moment when we gathered together at last in the theater space, our cameras pointing at the audience.cyberformance1

 

The audience became part of the work, forming an interesting multidimensional collage. I felt that all the concepts covered during the first half of the semester culminated in this moment during the performance, and I thought it was an absolutely amazing to see how it all came together to form such an interesting piece of networked performance.