There are 19 posts tagged archive (this is page 2 of 2).
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!
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.
glitches.remixes.edits.filters
The title of my final OSS project will be entitled glitches.remixes.edits.filters.
As an artist, my work revolves around picking up the trash and debris that is feelings, and rework them into something that’s worthwhile. A presentable melancholy, an accessible darkness. Melancholia and it’s friends are like glitches. Remixes, edits and filters rework these glitches and help assimilate them into normality, and giving them new life. It is a way to re-represent old information.
As a large part of my work derives from my participation in the virtual, digital space, I’m also looking at glitch art, and digital manipulation as ways of presenting my content. A glitch is defined as a “a short-lived fault in a system and often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot.”. I’m treating this definition in a metaphorical manner in relation to the process of blogging and writing in journals. These accounts are my way of dealing with negativity and issues, and eventually they exist as evidence that indeed, “this too shall past”.
Hence, I’d like to think of the issues I’ve blogged about as glitches, as transcient matters.
Digital manipulation had been a constant method of my art-making. In these series of collages, I’m combining real collages scanned from my physical journals, and reworking them digitally to create more layers of symbols and meanings. The addition of the planets, for example, is an allusion to early Internet art, part lo-fi, part ephemera, a reference to my own participation in the virtual space. In the last image, I’ve included some palace chat avatars, “dollz”, which were really popular ten years ago. It goes back to my hyperessay #1 in which I talk about the timeline of social media and popular websites. These dollz and other “relics” – the now defunct MSN messenger, MS Paint – constitutes this sense of nostalgia in the third space.
I’ve also distorted certain parts of the images and increased the colour information drastically, creating highly saturated areas of colours. This produces a “glitched” effect and is also symbolic of the intensity and saturated nature of my journals and blog.
In the first micro-project where we made one minute videos, I’ve briefly talked about the idea of the “double”. I want to go back to this theme as it is quite apparent in my practice.
The ‘double’ refers to writing and illustrating, two halves that make up my main practice as an artist. Writing and illustrating have always existed as separate processes for me and not processes that complement each other. The outcome for this final OSS project will include both writing and visual arts.
Here’s all my keywords arranged in the main ideas that I want to explore in my dictionary project and my FYP. I’ve given a title to summarise this whole mind-map and concept which I call “The Double”.
the double
The ‘double’ refers to writing and illustrating, two halves that make up my main practice as an artist. Writing and illustrating have always existed as separate processes for me and not processes that complement each other. I would like to combine both processes in my body of work for FYP and the dictionary project as I’ve never done it before.
This idea of the double also refers to duality and opposites, which is the sub-concept in my project. The process of writing and illustrating yields different ideas. In the mindmap above, I’ve categorised the keywords that come to mind when describing my illustrations and my writing. As you can see, they are very different. My illustrations are all part of a world that I create, often fantastical in nature. They are colourful and elaborate and I would like my illustrations to be appreciated for their aesthetics and techniques.
As an illustrator, I’m keen on exploring femininity. Most of my works are female-centric, they focus on the female figure and the emotional aspect of what it is like being a girl. There is a lot to explore about the female figure. She is an embodiment of a concept, a persona, and she is a form to be studied and admired. They are also colourful, full of patterns, and they are generally more fun.
I like to think that my words exist in black and white: topics and issues that I talk about in my writing come through more literally. I write constantly, and about the things that I think about and my responses to situations around me. Hence, these things aren’t made up, they are all real and much unlike my drawings. My writing is all part of an endless personal narrative that documents my experiences and an examination to how all of these contributes to my being, both as a person and as an artist.
outcome
‘Outcome’ is the list of keywords I would associate with the final outcome of my work, be it for the dictionary project or the FYP. It encompass all that is between “everything” and “nothing”. In my earlier entries on this OSS site, I’ve referenced a quote Paul Arden quite a few times:
“The problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. To replenish, to give away, the more you give away, the more comes back to you.”
Most, if not all, of the content that makes up this body of work is from my personal archive of words and pictures, from when I was a child, through my adolescent years, and finally now. The outputs from this archive is a form of purging for me. To challenge myself to let go of old ideals, and recreate again.
The keywords in this column are the expected goals I want to achieve with the outcomes of this entire project.
alternatives
This column is a pairing of keywords which are not necessarily opposite in nature, but describes my own alternative responses to some of the issues that are apparent in my work.
absence > presence
resolve > repress
longing > certainty
excess > reduction
resentment > reconcile
belief > non-belief
embrace > eradicate
macro > micro
The events listed in the micro column would make up the events listed in the macro column, and in turn will form the ideas listed in the methods column.
This is a draft and a quick sketch of my ideas, some of these thoughts would require some more fine tuning before being developed into a full-fledged project.
My project will be about archiving memories, particularly memories in a virtual space. What really sparked my interest in this was how quickly I realised the social media landscape has changed. Here’s a diagram of social media I found on Google:
I would say that that people my age are lucky enough to be able to have internet access at a relatively young age. I remember being able to access the Internet when I was about 8 years old. I think it’s really important to address this point on generation vs Internet, particularly in the area of social media. For me at least, I feel that I entered this whole virtual sphere at an age when it had helped significantly develop my sense of identity, interests and especially the idea of an online persona even before I really knew what that meant. It’s interesting to note though, before I’ve taken this OSS class, I’ve never truly examined the term ‘virtual’, ‘cyborgs’ or the ‘disembodied’, and even I find it hard sometimes to write about it in my research critiques because I think that to some extent, and for a large part of my life, I’ve been really living the virtual life and living out these concepts that we’re looking at, that I haven’t yet stepped back to take a look at all of this.
I was a huge Internet nerd. I was really big on Neopets.com and the website opened me to the world of html and css. I didn’t have much real-life hobbies then, but I enjoyed making webpages and creating content. I made my first blog with Blogger.com and I used my knowledge of basic html and css to tweak my layout so that I could include every facet of my Internet life – I remember adding the same Flickr photostream on the sidebar of my blog and uploaded pictures of my real life desktop clutter, my dogs, and (very rarely) pictures of myself taken with my webcam. I also bought a domain and explored making more complicated webpages. I loved the idea of having this virtual space for myself and being able to create and add whatever I want to this space.
Back to the social media landscape and what sparked my project: I realised the vast change when I logged into myspace.com a few months ago. It used to be a really popular social media website much like Facebook. The website had changed a lot, and presently, they have removed the blog function. My old profile and photos are still there, although I was more interested to find my old blog. I found a link where I could download a zip file of my blog archive and so I did.
It amazes me then, that I could simply download an archive of these things that I’ve written years ago, and at the same time, it never occurred to me that I could feel such nostalgia in such a technological context. So using the blog archive I’ve downloaded from MySpace, I made an online zine (http://beverleyng.com/internetmonsters) in which I try to encapsulate this nostalgia, by juxtaposing these entries with some artworks I made at that time I wrote the entries (even my artworks then were made on the computer), paired with some screenshots of other virtual things that I was interested in then.
This semester, I decided to take this project further by downloading the archive from my WordPress blog which I’ve been writing in for a long time. As I was downloading it and reworking them for a core module, I drew parallels with the various concepts that we have been discussing in class, as well as with the readings that we’ve done over the weeks. Beyond archiving entries, I am also interested to examine the various persons I’ve been throughout these years, and how these personas had been immortalized by words and kept in virtual space.
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I’ve not quite decided yet how to carry out my final project. I might have been a bit lengthy on the basis of this project, though I would like to be very serious about it as I want to carry it further in terms of final year project. But this is what I have so far, do comment below if you have any feedback or suggestions!
Saving pdfs of my archive, month after month, year after year. As you can see, it takes quite a few hours to do so, perhaps because I stopped many times along the way to take part in some predictable reminiscing.
While combing through my entries, I also found a handful of entries throughout the year, this is just about my all time favourite poem by david levithan (from the book ‘the realm of possibility’) it’s a well-thumbed book of mine, opened so many times to this poem, that flipping open the book takes me straight to that page. I believe I have more entries than these.
Just realised the book is also currently in my bag which I’m rereading for the millionth time, on my way to school. I never get tired of it.
a really short weekend, burned from looking through my physical journals and taking some photos. going to leaf through these books briefly and maybe sieve out some ideas for my final, or anything, really. i thought about the term “tags” and what randall packer said about “tag cloud”, perhaps that could be something. i think with this project, my material is really endless and heavy, and i could go so many ways.
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some stuff that i wrote some time ago from my blog, that may be useful for research and this project on archiving and remembering time. thoughts about the process of memories, blogging and keeping a journal.
spent the weekend dreaming again. it was terrible. i don’t know what i am thinking man. i quickly made a few pages of a new zine last night, because the thought of you is too terrible. it is called “letters to you in Arial”. i made it because i imagined that if i had a typeface to carry the spirit of my writing, I would use Arial. i wanted to hide behind Arial because it is used on many boring letters you do not want to receive. bills and admin stuff. and handouts in school. you don’t know the writer. oh but it is ok. does not matter.
Thought about reviving my tumblr and posting art related things there. Keeping a blog is effort. Keeping a picture blog- more effort. I guess it is why, year after year, I am able to blabber incessantly on this page. It is far easier to write. But then, I also have feelings to account for. feelings often need to be expressed in words, rather than pictures. For me at least.
Realised I have been blogging for 10 years. How very long. And how very whiny. Perhaps. I am happy that there are little pictorial documentation of my teenage life, as discussed previously… I was an ugly teenager. Like damn ugly and fucking awkward. Yes a fair percentage of us all had been awkward to a certain degree, but mostly this side to them shed away after a while and suddenly they just become average people. Normal. They just breezed through this awkward phase to become this completely nondescript character. I really don’t know how I am still not pass this stage. Am I ? I really don’t know. Very sad. But anyway, I’m glad these written words are all that is left about teenage me. It would be difficult to paint a picture of me with these dark pieces of writing if you don’t know me. Thank goodness.
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.
here’s a result of my google search for internet time capsule
It’s called the Way Back Machine.
452 billion web pages saved over time.
