virtual playground

To help provide a more comprehensive overview on what I am interested to explore as an artist, I’ve put together a webpage with links and details to the various small-scale projects I’ve made related to my theme on how the Internet is used to shape our growth as individuals. I call my website a virtual playground. Still in the works, but I think I can put this together quite quickly and be finished by tonight.

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beverley.tv is my final project for Internet Art & Culture where I will share my art-making process via self-broadcasting tools like Periscope and Quicktime screen recording.

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Some projects that I made last semester that led me to explore my concept in finer detail for FYP.

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Lastly, I have a page for my FYP, which is a web version of my presentation.

I hope to make use of my website to convey what I am doing in a more interesting and self-explanatory way. Through this website, I hope to showcase a combination of my skills as well as my interest in long-form storytelling. Each project page is made in a continuous scroll format, which I find very useful in explaining something in detail while maintaining some kind of linear form. The seamless nature of this web layout enhances the viewing experience by omitting any clicking or external functions which I feel is disruptive to the experience.

You can see the work in progress as I update it here.

 

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.

 

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.)

 

 

Project Hyperessay 3: Conclusion

Project Link

outline

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

online

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

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

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

performative chance art

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

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

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

long form content

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

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

reflections

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

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

collecting data

today i’m compiling my archive with PrintFriendly, a really useful tool to simplify the data on my blog page. it’s going to be a tedious affair to collate the amount of data on my blog, having to manually convert each page to a pdf format, so that i can manipulate the content. i’ve tried all sorts of nerdy stuff including exploring the ‘export’ function on wordpress, but the result is an incomprehensible mass of codes.

so this is the first step in gathering material for the outcome of this project. i’m definitely considering the idea of long-form storytelling.

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