Research Critique 5: Shredder and Riot

 

shredder02shredder01 shredder03 shredder04

Shredder, 1998

 

shredder05 riot01 riot02

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.

shredder03

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.

 

Final Project sketch: beverley.tv

bevertvpilot

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.

modfam_01

 

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.

beverley.tv

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.

 

Neopets Retrospective

 

I normally talk about movies and cartoons from the previous decade but I feel it’s time that’s time to discuss something that’s more  exclusive to the 2000s, and that’s the popularization of the internet. I know it’s been around since the 90s, but back then it’s mainly used for pornography and black market goods. I know that’s still the main use to many but as the 2000s decade was progressing, all these new websites were coming along, many of which was for social networking that wasn’t something most kids were going into, so what kids really had then was this wonderful browser-based animal RPG called Neopets. It’s where I went onto the internet when I was young. Neopets was probably riding off the super popularity/success that was Pokemon. Neopets was a site where we could have virtual pets, and there was a large world there that we could do quite a bit in… it was just a quirky early internet site made for college students…

A transcript from the video which I found earlier today about Neopets, and I want to write a bit about it as I think it’s a good starting point/back story to the virtual part of my project.

I think Neopets.com is the virtual equivalent of a physical childhood play thing for some people my age. If you asked them what is their earliest internet memory, perhaps it will be Neopets. Like Pokemon, Neopets is made up of fictional world that is richly inhabited with creatures, items and many more. I didn’t own a GameBoy when I was a child, but once in a while when I meet my cousins, I would borrow their GameBoy and play Pokemon on it. We would take turns playing it and while it was quite fun, I never fully experience the fun of being a Pokemon trainer. But I had a computer at home and my cousin got me onto Neopets. I became so obsessed with it, and I was absolutely enchanted by this rich world. That was in 2004 when I was ten years old.

Anyway I could go on about why I loved Neopets so much, but it is quite embarrassing and I remembered being called a ‘Neopets freak’ in primary school, and it’s not the main idea of this entry… But what I eventually took away from my Neopets-crazed days was learning how to code stuff. There was a page on the website that taught users basic CSS and HTML (things couldn’t get that complicated on a web browser then anyway), which they could apply on their user profiles to beautify it. Looking back, I thought this was a very interesting way to get users to personalize their profiles. I’m not sure what was the reason behind encouraging players to use coding to change their colours of the text and add web links. As a young girl, I was drawn to making my user profile pretty and stuff, so I had to learn these basic tips and I think that really got me interested with web pages and web design. I didn’t have a topic that I was interested in, so I dedicated most of the web pages I made to my dog. I took pictures of my dog and put them on the web page, and accompanied the photos with stories about her. neopetshtml

Anyway, I got really carried away making all these web pages. But it was all in good fun, and I eventually quit playing Neopets, moving on to making more of these webpages for good.

I wish I had screenshots for all these stuff. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to embark on the virtual part of my project. The Internet is brilliant, and with it, we are able to keep track of data. I quoted Deyan Sudjic previously about the immortality of data on the virtual reality, but I sometimes feel that paradoxically, all of these data is quite ephemeral, as objects of memory. They are more fleeting than physical things: a piece of Post-It someone left for you, or a piece of jewellery your aunt gave you. The concept of time and relevance on the Internet is perceived differently than in reality. Once something is updated, and new things come along, you can’t really find an old version anymore. Things get old quickly on the Internet. Servers and domain spaces have a time limit. My old websites can never be retrieved again because the free web hosts I were using were either gone, or were developed into something else. I tried to keep backups of my artworks on the Internet on a thumb drive, but I lost it ages ago. Amongst various attempts of rebooting my virus-infected computer also leads to the loss of data over the years. What I have now is my blog, my Internet journal. Even the media I upload have a shaky, unpredictable life span. Old pictures from 2005 cannot be retrieved, because the servers have died. I thought my blog would be the most appropriate thing I can use to talk about this ephemeral nature of Internet memory, because I have been using my blog for a long time, and given it’s time and space on the virtual realm, it is quite a relic. The rest of my Internet ventures have been very short-lived, relevant for the time that it was popular.

Neopets’ rich fantastical world also retains the nostalgic and innocent quality of childhood playthings, albeit on a digital space. When it became really popular back then with children, it was labeled as a website with ‘sticky content’ that got children to spent hours and hours per week on it (children like me). Comparatively speaking, the effects of Neopets on young people is nothing compared to websites like Tumblr and applications like Instagram, both of which are used widely by many young people. Tumblr is also a rich world full of content pertaining to real-life and popular culture. It is a mass Internet media of unfiltered content, which can be a good and bad thing. For example, pornography .gifs are a popular thing on Tumblr. Skinny inspiration is also popular on the website.  I mean, I’m no prude or anything, but I find it quite worrying that such content are so easily accessible to anybody. Along with the few other popular social websites, it generates and feeds a culture that thrives on these images for envy and jealousy. Tumblr’s (in)famous endless scrolling function means that you’re constantly, forever, addicted to this stream of content.

 

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.

 

 

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.

netartizen

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.

 

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:

 

 

Photo 16-8-15 11 34 01 am Photo 16-8-15 11 34 22 am

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.

 

 

is this the real life

lolfyp gg

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!