the glitch moment(um) by rosa menkman

Was introduced to this reading in Internet Art & Culture class. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist who is specialised in glitch art. She is also a theorist, specifically in the area of glitch art, so this piece of writing is a key reading for my project.

Some relevant points for my research:


brief history: the notion of glitch art was just crossing over from sound culture, and leaking into visual art cultures only sporadically. 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 found more and more artifact-based correspondences between audio and visual technologies, such as compres- sions, feedback and glitches.

the collapse of pal (2010): I tried to underline that there is more to glitch art, and more at stake, than just design and aesthetics. The work addresses themes such as planned obsolescence, built-in nostalgia, critical media aes- thetics and the gentrification and continuing development of a glitch art genre.

definition of glitch according to rosa: I describe the ‘glitch’ as a (actual and/or simulated) break from an expected or conventional flow of information or meaning within (digital) communication systems that results in a perceived accident or error. A glitch occurs on the occasion where there is an absence of (expected) functional- ity, whether understood in a technical or social sense. Therefore, a glitch, as I see it, is not always strictly a result of a technical malfunction.

relationship between technical and metaphorical or cultural dimensions of glitch culture. Focusing on the glitch within this broader perspective makes it possible to think through some of the more interesting political and social uses of the glitch within the field of digital art.

Moreover, glitch transitions between artifact and filter, or, in other words, between radical breakages and commodification.

glitch studies manifesto:

2. Dispute the operating templates of creative practice. Fight genres, interfaces and expectations! Refuse to stay locked into one medium or between contradictions like real vs. virtual, ob- solete vs. up-to-date, open vs. proprietary or digital vs. analog. Surf the vortex of technol- ogy, the in-between, the art of artifacts!

4. Employ bends and breaks as metaphors for différance. Use the glitch as an exoskel- eton 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.

5. Realize that the gospel of glitch art also tells about new standards implemented by corruption. Not all glitch art is progressive or something new. The popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and unavoidable. Be aware of easily reproducible glitch effects automated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch will become a fashion.

.gif + dither: Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that supports 8 bits per pixel. This compression can therefore consist of no more then 256 colors. The format supports animation and employs dither (a grain or block artifact). Dither helps to prevent images from displaying or transforming into large-scale patterns such as ‘banding’ (a stepped process of rendering smooth gradations in brightness or hue).

what happens to glitch? However, if the cause of the glitch remains unknown, the glitch can either be ignored and forgotten, or transformed into an interpretation or reflection on a phenomenon (or the memory there- of) defined by a social or cultural context (conventions, histories, perspectives) and the technology that is malfunctioning.

humanizing errors: A glitch represents a loss of control. The glitch makes the computer itself suddenly appear unconventionally deep, in contrast to the more banal, predictable surface-level behaviors of ‘normal’ machines and systems. The glitch has become a new mode; and its previous uncanny encounter has come to register as an ephemeral, personal experience of a machine.

accident of art: Notions of disaster, aesthetics of failure and accidental events have been integral to modern and contemporary art, Avant-Garde progressions and turnings.

To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway. To get what is heavier than air to take off in the form of an aeroplane or dirigible is to invent the crash, the air disaster. As for the space shuttle, Challenger, its blowing up in flight in the same year that the tragedy of Chernobyl occurred is the original accident of a new motor, the equivalent of the first ship-wreck of the very first ship.

— Paul Virilio

cultural meaning: Virilio argues that although many people encounter ac- cidents as negative experiences, an accident can also have positive consequences. The accident doesn’t only equal failure, but can also ‘reveal something absolutely necessary to knowledge’. The accident (and thus the glitch) shows a system in a state of entropy and so aids towards an understanding of the ultimate functioning of a system. This opens up space for research and practice, and the arts are a special domain for this. Dadaists and Surrealists cannot be understood without World War 1. Virilio explains how WW1 blew reality into pieces and how the cubist painter Georges Braque collected those pieces and put them back together, not just as a formalist experiment or as a destruction of perspective but as an artistic realism appropri- ate to the techno-cultural present. Thus, many artists could only use some (destroyed or mutilated) form of figuration. This understanding leads Virilio to conclude that in the art of the accident. In the digital realm, what has come to be known as glitch art deals with the digital dimension of error, accident and disaster from different angles, within a larger context of cultural meaning.

defining glitch art?  Their destructive or disfiguring processes have no technological name, definition or explanation (yet). For this reason, it is necessary to not only define and categorize glitch at technological levels, but also to look closely at how specific media are exploited on a more complex techno-cultural level.

databend generative artists such as stAllio!, glitch-irion Pixelnoizz and Hellocatfood.

inherent openness of glitch as a concept makes glitch art difficult, if not impossible, to define.

binary approach to glitch art? 

Design-driven glitch art has tended to be referred to as artificial or ‘glitch-alike’. Iman Moradi has gone so far as to develop a true-false binary to deal with these matters of glitch imitation, which he explains with the following statement and schema: Because of the intrinsic nature of this imagery and its relation to pure glitches, both in terms of process and viewer perception, I felt the need to form a word that adequately describes this artifact’s similarity with actual glitches and present it as an obviously separate entity. Thus the term “Glitch-alike” came about to fulfil this role. […] Glitch-alikes are a collection of digital artefacts that resemble visual aspects of real glitches found in their original habitat.

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intentional faux-pas: They challenge the ideological aspects of proprietary design by misrepresenting existing relationships between specific media functionalities and the aesthetic experiences normally associated with them.

You cannot prohibit the catastrophe, you must surf it!11

– PAUL VIRILIO

the perfect glitch: The perfect glitch exists, momentarily, at the shocking tipping point between (potential) failure and a movement towards the creation of a new understanding. The glitch’s inherent moment(um), the power it needs or has to pass through an existing membrane or semblance of understanding, helps the utterance to become an unstable ar- ticulation of counter-aesthetics, a destructive generativity.

built-in obsolescence and pop culture: technological progressions causes built-inp obsolescence. things are designed to last x number of years before they become obsolete. I would like to argue that this economical reasoning is very much connected to the growing fetishization of nostalgic imperfection in (glitch) art, which over the last decades has become a kind of conceptual virus. Today it is completely normal to pay extra money for aesthetically appealing plugins like Hipstamatic or Instagram, that imitate (analogue) imperfections or nostalgic errors, like ‘faux vintage’ lens flare and lomographic discolorations.

 

 

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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.

 

Research: Derrida’s deconstruction

Notes from various books on Derrida’s deconstruction.

Deconstruction For Beginners, Jim Powell

Our minds work by way of binary opposites. They form pairs:

east/west
male/female
mind/body
muslim/pagan
christian/pagan
sacred/profane
speech/writing

Our minds make use of this kind of either/or logic to put everything in the world into neat little categories. The problem is that we tend to privilege one memeber of the pair and repress/oppress the other. This kind of phallogocentric thinking governs not only our social life, but our philosophical, scientific, literary and legal thought as well.

Deconstruction is a way of reading a text.

Derrida Reframed, K. Malcolm Richards

Destruction is not a negative act, but also a positive act, such as clearing away something that is no longer useful. The term ‘to deconstruct’ conjures an image of a structure or object in mid-air, suspended, all of its parts visible. Deconstruction can also conjure an image of something in the midst of collapse, not destroyed, but falling apart — a ruin, even. To deconstruct something suggests that the act of taking something apart can be the first step toward understanding something anew.

The idea of delay can be thought of in the way the meaning of a work of art accrues only with time. When we examine works of art or popular culture closely and on more than one occasion, the meaning of the work will be different over time. If delay is one element to differance, then difference is the other. This spatial distance structuring our exterior relations to the world is simultaneously a structure dependent on internal constructs. These internal constructs framing our relation to the world collide with the myriad external structures that come to mediate our visual experience.

The role of institutions in constructing our image of the part impacts in some way our image of the present. In framing what is included and excluded for an exhibition, numerous decisions must be made. In the space of the archive, however, reside objects that have the potential to deconstruct the values framing an institution. (Christopher William’s) work offers powerful examples of how an artist’s work can be further appreciated by approaching it from a deconstructive stance. Williams also works frequently with archives, finding in the space of the archive a space filled with potential for deconstruction.

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.. 😀

David Carson and dirty type

The introduction and success of the personal computer allowed for designers to take the clean design of modernism, destroy it and reassemble it in a new visual language. Most associated with the ideas of deconstruction was the designer David Carson whose work for the magazines Ray Gun and Beach Culture helped develop the aesthetic commonly referred to simply as deconstruction. Wolfgang Weingart‘s approach to typography and design was being carried on by April Greiman and labeled as New Wave. Emigre exploded onto the scene in 1984 with a host of new approaches to, and uses for, typography. All while students from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, such as Ed Fella and Andrew Blauvelt were allowed the freedom to explore and develop these, and many other design aesthetics.

design is history

I really like David Carson’s design approach and I feel that my work will have some elements of his style.

Thematically, it pairs well with this concept of remixing that I am exploring in my work. I think what I want to do is not just to simply present whatever I have on hand as it is, but to give it a new meaning.

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I feel that the style of deconstruction and dirty type has never been fully explored by students in ADM. In my VC classes, we are constantly exposed to very particular kinds of aesthetic, which one of my VC prof finally addressed in our final critique some time ago by picking up a couple of publications and saying quite simply that “these are all the same”. What I can observe from this is that orderly layouts inspired by the grid and clean typefaces are making a comeback. In the past, minimalist, clean layouts were just as popular as it is today, revered for its timeless quality. Before this, grunge typography and dirty type like what Carson had made here had been considered inspiring and revolutionary. Designers, armed with the computer, are able to digitally manipulate the clean design of modernism, destroy it and reassemble it in a new visual language.

Using the glitch experiment tool I shared in my previous post, I’ll glitch up body of texts for fascinating results, and then use that as a starting point for my typographical and layout exploration.

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.

gl1tchussource

 

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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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.

 

Remixthebook — Mark Amerika

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In Internet Art & Culture class, we talked about collaborative art making. Here’s one of the works we looked at: Remixthebook by Mark Amerika. I briefly discussed the idea of remixing in my work, and I think this piece by Mark Amerika would kind of illustrate what the idea of remixing is about.

Some info about the work:

remixthebook author Mark Amerika, along with co-curator and artist Rick Silva, has invited over 25 contributing international artists, poets, and critical theorists, all of them interdisciplinary in their own practice-based research, to sample from remixthebook and manipulate the selected source material through their own artistic and theoretical filters.
Go to the remixes>

Remixing gives new meaning to an existing piece of work. It builds a collective narrative, and allows the work to be a communication tool, by inviting other people to lend their own voices to the work.

I think for my project, the term remixing also have other meanings.

  • It’s more than just an introspective throwback: it’s the outcome of challenging myself to work with something old and give it a new lease of life.
  • Remixing as part of my artistic identity: I take what I’ve learned over the course of my life and appropriating these skills for the project. For example, painting over my material, photographing significant places, glitching up my blog. Am I an illustrator? No. Am I a programmer? No. Am I a photographer? Hell no. But remixing using these techniques demonstrate my chapalang (mishmash, random) artistic identity
  • It’s kind of like a conversation/mash up with my self. Like for the Internet Monsters project that I did, I try to put my old work in another context. I think that’s the fun part of the project too. It’s not just about putting old stuff out there and be all like ‘hey look what I made in year 2007″. Kind of like collaborating with myself. What can Beverley from 2007 and Beverley from 2015 make together?

Works from Venice Biennale

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I forgot the name of the artist who did these boxes, but I think this gives me an idea of how i can store the blog-rolls that I made last semester. One of the things that I would like to get started on and finish this semester is to think about how I can improve on that work.

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Peter Friedl’s The Diaries, 1981-2014

More than 300 closed notebooks are displayed in piles within specially designed museum showcases. The Diaries is an epic staging of real time, memory, volume, and text on paper. Thousands upon thousands of densely filled pages covering a period of over 30 years testify to the impossibility of capturing bare life in words. His diary installation is a study in narration and is open to change. As private books and authentic documents authored equally by professional writers and amateurs, diaries sit ambivalently on the threshold of literature and history. Their centuries-long tradition has given rise to many ways of constructing, documenting and revoking subjectivity. By blocking access to the contents of his enshrined, closed diaries, Peter Friedl invites the viewer to contemplate the multi-layered meaning of how aesthetic experience and imagination work. In an era of open access and ubiquitous surveillance, overabundant communication and information, the artist’s “real allegory” takes on critically new importance. It questions the power of display and imagination, the drama of form and content as well as the fragility of autonomy.

The Diaries plays with notions of the anachronistic, precarious, and unfinished. Yet Friedl’s installation subverts the myth of immediacy in order to offer an alternative composed of withdrawal, silence, and introspection. Simple, mundane activities such as reading and writing become tools and aids for potential resistance and emancipation.

As a visual prologue to the diary project, the exhibition will include a selection of Friedl’s own childhood drawings from the 1960s. Like the notebooks, the authenticating medium of the drawing can be experienced as a piece of material culture. — e-flux journal

This work is particularly relevant to my own work, definitely. The printed archive of my blog could be seen as the technological counterpart of collecting journals. Will be referencing this work in my report.

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samson kambalu

I have no real idea what this work is about. But I like the presentation of this one. Framed pictures are purposefully installed on the wall, against the text (an angry letter which was written quite humorously).