reflection on meta/data

Read Mark Amerika’s Meta/Data, over the past two days. I enjoyed it so much. His writing is sometimes funny and I found many of the points so useful to my work. Some of my thoughts were written after reading a couple of the essays, and I found it helpful that it prompted me to think about how I can write about my process and concept better.

My findings, in point form currently. Trying to integrate it with the rest of my report.

And here’s my finalised project title at last:

life in pixels: an autobiographical work in progress

project’s contribution to VC?
visual communication as an expanding field, pushing boundaries of traditional VC practice.
not limiting myself to graphic design.
moving beyond print media.
hybrid processes
explore beyond 2D page of print media and integrating technology and the Internet into my work
mining digital terrain for autobiographical purposes (self-portrait)
built-in obsolence of virtual memories. compare digital archiving with physical archiving
the persona vs the character. exploring the projection of self through various media, what it means
physical journals contain the touch of hand and the tactility of print. what is its technological counterpart and how can i show that through my work?
visual vocabulary and language of the internet
context: what is net art like before 2000? what does this new media mean for artists’ practices then?
how far did they come from the early networked/performance art (i.e Nam June Paik) and other performer-artists?
tools are easily accessible to my generation. we are able to immediately make art with photoshop at hand. online communities are youth-led, often explore the potential of integrating traditional and digital ways of making art.
easy for us to use these tools to our advantage and narrate our stories.
the impermanence of time in a data-driven environment. what’s time like on the internet.
what does archiving and collecting mean to me and my art practice?
the glitch as a reimagined metaphor in my artwork.
quantifying one’s life through data-collecting, all of this is part of a larger story: the public vs private
research and process is the narrative
vannevar bush: trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory
blog entries = experiential content, experiential database
benefits of creating an alchemical remix of narrative strategies
my desire to run away from social media and virtual affirmation
the digital source material, ready for immediate remix, reinterpretation at a click
new media experience. my web identity
internet of time, built-in obscolence
net artist who capture consciousness with readily available digital apparatus
an autobiographical work in progress
i operate in a more fluid, interdisplinary lifestyle
on remixing: i can look back of whatever traces i left behind and reapply my conscious to it again
flux online persona: ‘heroine’, my teenage online identity
burrowing underground for shards of light. source material. my work is all source material.
look at specific themes that have been at the core of my practice (hybridized)
write, draw, make
big issue themes such as feeling alien in status quo culture, tapping spiritual unconscious, alienation, bullying, rigidity of academia, rule-based system, beauty differences, turning all that into an autobiographical work in progress memoir
instant gratification: what the internet gives us, and what this generation will feel much of the consequences of. what are the long term effects of instant gratification?
making art for an online audience who are always ever ready to accept them
interconnected digital narratives, besides the blog, my source material comes from defunct web pages (insert screenshots)
identify time period that you look at the source material
my life as a medium transporting experiential knowledge into visual remixes
my memories of what it is i was doing when i captured my source material, by being an active participant online, by being a blogger, being a ‘heroine’ (online alter ego)
virtual communities that provide us a suitable place to shape our personas
the comfort of knowing who you can be and how much more accurate that portrayal of yourself can b, if you allow yourself to be online and making use of the necessary tools to shape yourself
what visual vocabulary is involved when you are in the process of shaping this persona
how did the shaping of an online, unalienated persona, shape my real, physical life and as an artist
in the age of network cultures, the eye touches rather than it sees. it immerses itself in the tactile sense it feels when caught in the heat of the meaning making process
part of a greater desire to become part of the socio cultural mosaic
multilinear narrative environments. how is narrative distributed, how is it existing on the online space? narrative types? is html narrative
adapting to new skins. collaborate with new technologies
advent of the internet as globally distributed network of digital art created for artists and scholars to evolve alternative lives of inquiry that will have critical ramifications in our culture. in areas where we compose, publish, exhibit, distribute and network these knowledge
breaking barriers: geographical, time
progressive art practice integrated with info-driven community/society. online publication/exhibition
utilisation of cross-media platforms embed research, thinking, self-reflection, in doing so, changing way artworks are communicated and accessed
interactive digital art. data visualisation, further educate ourselves to perform in this dynamic, computer-mediated environment.
transferring creative and critical skill sets to the information, data-driven age.
internet is an opportunity to bring wider visibility to an individual’s art practice, creative process. such process can be shared immediately online, open a network of external lives in real/online life that gives artists and the work a more significant place.
visual communication can expand and contribute to multimedia art/new media environment, including web publishing, digital narrative, wireless networking, interactive cinemma, artist e-books, motion picture graphics, data visualisation, online art exhibition, generative art, code art, database aesthetics
to theoretically articulate, through critical visual design skills and transferring that skill set to the information age. using that visual skill set to create user interface, focusing on bringing that print/tactile experience to the screen, to issues like site navigation, program functionality
to innovatively combine traditional visual communication practice and further expand on the existing function of print, emphasising on reconfiguring the conventional notions of reading, writing and accessing the print media
to take into considertation, that data becomes a part of open-source, a material in itself, a narrative device
the history and practice of net art before and after WWW. (include artworks)
how other artistic media enabale us to place the emerging forms of digital art in their historical and aesthetic context
students feel they have a certain amount of control over distribution of their work. with digital art they can immediately publish and exhibit their work
sites, homes, texts, digital being, all takes place in the placelessness of cyberspace
repeated gifs of defunct websites
rethinking representation: moving beyond the knowing and entering a world of immersive topographies that open up unknown narrative worlds composed of unstable identities
my online persona character of Heroine
how can i respond to the rapidly changing aesthetic, political and economic realities presented to our contemporary society with advent of computer, internet and social media?
so much of our commercial and subversive art is developed with software apps that encourages the liberal use of modernistic practices, sampling, collage, tech gimmickry, engineered behaviours
what we are doing is not all that new. looking for structural changes in these works and approaches, you are likely to find changes in mediums through which this art gets distributed and how emerging network culture transform the way we participate in appreciating and making art
what is a blog? could be an autobiographical work in progress, surfs for data, sample, manipulation, and exhibited in a space that is more than just a diary web site

google sheets

In the past month, I’ve worked a lot with Google Sheets. It helps me to organise my categories and tags easily.

Due to the scale of the project and the personal, arbitrary nature of journal entries, it can be tedious and tricky to build the database of tags and categories. Here’s how I tagged my entries.

– Tags: subject matter, activity, event, names

After a review of my Sheets, I am on the fence about using Categories as part of the database narrative. Categories are more general than tags, which can be very specific, and as a rule, I categorised my entries based on the general tone/subject matter of the entry, which can be quite tricky because as I’ve said, entries can be arbitrary. I thought about how my dataset could work for me and I find that tags may offer a better solution. A combination of say, tags + time, will project quite interesting visualisations, and definitely more effective as well. Categories would become an extra set of variable, and because they can look rather similar to tags, it would be really confusing too.

Here’s an overview of my Sheets. This is from January 2005 – 2015. There’s a lot of cleanup to be done, for sure.

Sorting of Categories.

All the tags, before they are sorted. Tags in the colour columns belong to a bigger category, while those on the left side are more specific.For my Facts & Fictions final, I narrowed down the categories and tags and worked with these.

Sketches of my visualisation, using Google Sheets.

“january” progress

I’m finished with tagging entries up till 2010, although only entries up to 2009 have been uploaded on the site so far. The rest are on the Textedit file on my computer. I’ve been working with really unstable network connection and it’s driving me up the wall. I think this is one of the drawbacks of moving your work around and doing it on the go.

Also, I am quite frustrated with the amount of spam comments that are generated by my blog, even more so with the fact that Akismet offers the service for a ‘minimal fee’. I went with the free option anyway, but it does not make sense to pay to get rid of spam comments.

On the website, you will see a grid image. It’s meant to be a filler image at the moment. I will be writing a WordPress theme for this website, something close to a sketch I made a while ago. The entries are available for viewing (under the read more tag). I am still interested to have the metadata as the narrative. You can see that my tag cloud is quite specific.

The next step for my project is to plot in the number of entries per category/tag into Google sheets and creating a skeleton for a visualisation using the charts.

I am also paying attention to how I feel as a result on embarking on this project. It didn’t make me feel good to look at my own writing and experience in such close detail. I have the same feelings when I worked on the ‘dictionary’ project last semester. At that point of time, I felt mortified at some of the entries. I become more aware of myself, and that some of my flaws have been apparent for a long time, and I may not have looked into them or addressed them at all. But this are more personal reflections of my project that I think I’m not ready to share right now, without going through a long story about the roots of my angst, etc. I’ve been writing down some of these reflections as I do my work, and I hope to put them together as part of the conclusion for the project. All of this is a work in a progress, my personal self, the project… at the end of the day, I would like to be able to look at this project and know that I have made something good out of what I’m not proud of.

visualising january: part one

This week we begin preparing for our final project for Facts & Fictions. I’m taking this opportunity to apply my newfound skills to my current project by visualising the entries from January over the period of 2005 to 2015 (January x 10). The amount of data over this period is a good size to work with for the final project (which will culminate in a group show in another 14 days), and I think it is a perfect chance for me to try visualising a part of my FYP.

These are some of my process shots:

Filtering entries from January 2005: there are 17 items, of which I am going to individually tag and categorise them. In 2005, I was still on Blogger, and the blogging platform is very simple, and I don’t remember tags or categories existing on Blogger then. So it was quite a good thing that my entries are left un-tagged/categorised, now I can be very specific about how I want to label the entries for the sake of this project.

I am also doing tagcrowding again, with the help of Miriam Quick, who does research for information design. With her guidance, I learned how to use Tagcrowd in a more resourceful manner. She also taught me how I can use Google Sheets to my advantage, by showing me lots of cool stuff that can be done with Sheets. After running through my text in Tagcrowd, I went on to omit common words, and made a list of frequent words I use. This is different from individually tagging my entries, which I feel is something I would have to do manually if I really wanted to be specific about the topics that I wrote about, and I think there’s no shortcut to this part. Tagcrowding would be useful for highlighting linguistic details like: lingo, swearing, emotive words, and even names. This could be an interesting area to visualise on its own, so at the same time, I am also creating an additional dataset for that aspect.

I’ve installed WordPress on my own site again, for this January project. Currently, there’s nothing fancy there yet, but I think the taxonomy is taking shape and I am very excited about it. I’ve just finished importing entries from January 2005. You can take a look at it as I update it with more January entries, although I must warn you that some of the entries are very juvenile. Please bear with my 13 year old self. Haha.

Overall, this whole process of creating the metadata is far less agonising that I expected it to be. Before embarking on the January project, I read through all the January entries in the ten years, which left me in a very sombre and nostalgic mood, but all of that is gone when I go all technical about the work. That really gave me an idea to write a reflection piece after I have completed making these datasets for my archive. It would be interesting to include in my process book.

I’ll share more when I finish making the datasets for each year, and also my process on how I will visualise everything.

collecting data

It’s not easy to work with data, I think, especially when I have absolutely no experience with it. Here’s what I got so far. I highlighted the text according to categories (school/self/etc). I’m not sure how I might go about deconstructing the text. I got a book about data visualising, so I’m currently reading through it.

blogspot.jodi

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.

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.

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.. 😀

WIP: type + collage

Been spending these haze-filled days making these collages and experimenting with type layout. The first gif image of type shows my process of creating a few character styles on indesign. I think that would help speed up my process since I have tons of type to go through. Also, with just a click I can see how they come together. Been flipping through Carson’s books for this.

Then these are the scans of the collages I’ve been making. I will eventually print the manipulated type on tracing paper and wrap it around the printed collage, rather than directly on the collage itself. Helps to give the work some texture and dimension.

I’m working on a few different things at once, and I’m not really sure if it’s clear what I’m trying to do for each outcome, but writing here helps a lot. Also have tons of references that I got to categorise… I will work my way through slowly. All exciting and good stuff!!

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.

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.

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.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Mar
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31