Research Critique V: Webcam Mediated Communication

Before the YouTube personality existed, there was JenniCam. Jennifer is a true Internet personality, even before the term was used extensively. The project JenniCam offers viewers uninhibited views into Jennifer’s private world. In Steve Dixon’s essay on webcams as surveillance, he defines the webcam as a kind of “documentary realism” which is very relevant to what Jennifer is doing with her webcam. This realism involves uncensored views into her world, capturing footages that ranges from the mundane to the sexual. Raw footages like this are unedited and shared publicly with an unknown audience.

JenniCam is an important example that illustrates this idea of vulnerability and authenticity expressed in Annie Abraham’s essay:

“In a society where authenticity and privacy become endangered it is important to find ways to access our vulnerabilities and doubts, to make them public, to cherish our messy side. We need to make space for the beast in the beauty, to go back to reality, to claim the human. “We need to trap reality in order to make it available for thought.”

Indeed, the JenniCam archives must be quite an interesting collection of personal history for Jennifer. Her willingness to be so open in capturing herself in moments that are usually very awkward for most of us to face (like pleasuring herself sexually, or not having makeup on the face, looking extremely messy and plain sometimes) is a daring move in attempting to record her daily life down to these raw and vulnerable details. This authenticity also gives the JenniCam project a sort of endearing quality even, in the realm of Internet personalities and virtual fame. I would like to illustrate this point by referring to the idea of webcam falsities and fictions. JenniCam begin merely as a form of communication between Jennifer and her mother, so her mother could see what she was up to in her dorm at school. Jennifer’s deadpan honesty about the practical use of her webcam and her declaration of not being “an entertainer” gives the project a very real and human quality that sets her apart from many webcam/virtual personalities that soon follow after her.

w r now[here]: Cyberformance critique

Having a chance to participate in this cyberformance is definitely one of the highlights of Media and Performance class. By being the key performers of this segment in the symposium, we can better understand some of the concepts illustrated in class regarding performance art and the third space.

w r now[here] allows us to work with a real cyber performance artist, Helen Varley Jamieson. Rehearsals and preparations were connected through Adobe Connect, in true virtual fashion. For two weeks, we went through rehearsals using our mobile phones, testing webcams and our connection settings. Even though the performance takes place online, it is also crucial to take into account real-life circumstances. One of the most important points to take note during our performance was not to show our faces or to show each other. Taking that into consideration, my classmates and I had to make sure that our starting point, the “nowhere” are relatively far away from each other. There were a few of us situated at every level and corner of the school. Eventually, we have to meet in the lobby to slowly make our way to the theatre. This part of the performance was rather tricky as we were already gathered in a group. Yet, we took care to remain out of each other’s viewfinders. It is quite fun and required some improvisation: some of us pointed our cameras to the ceilings, some focused on other people in that area, and then some of us kept our cameras focused on one object. I think we succeeded in this area, after looking at our performance on Vimeo.

Another key point to note is definitely the technical difficulties faced. The university network was down just minutes before the performance was to go live, and we had a little collective moment of panic. Thankfully, the technical situation was fixed quickly. During our rehearsals and our mobile cam exercises that led up to the performance, we also encountered various technical failures such as unable to log in to Adobe Connect. Fortunately, all of us performers were located in the same space during the day of the performance and we made use of the same connection during the actual performance, so we didn’t have these issues.

One important takeaway from this performance was my understanding of some of the artworks discussed in class. For weeks, we discussed about cyborgs, the body as an instrument, the telematic embrace and the third space. One of the works I critiqued in this class was Robert Whitman’s American Moon. After the performance, I felt I could understand Whitman’s work better. Here’s a description of the work from the syllabus page:

“Whitman created a multi-dimensional theater environment that gave viewers differing perspectives on action taking place in a central theatrical area.”

I would liken the sectioning of the audience in Whitman’s work to our webcams during the performance, especially during the moment when we gathered together at last in the theater space, our cameras pointing at the audience.

The audience became part of the work, forming an interesting multidimensional collage. I felt that all the concepts covered during the first half of the semester culminated in this moment during the performance, and I thought it was an absolutely amazing to see how it all came together to form such an interesting piece of networked performance.

Project Hyperessay 3: Conclusion

Project Link

outline

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

online

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

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

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

performative chance art

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

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

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

long form content

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

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

reflections

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

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

Mobile Cam Exercise: we R here again

Diana and I decided to try the mobile cam exercise again, to demonstrate the idea of being at the same place, but not physically together. This time we both set up a meeting during our respective classes. The connection is far more stable today (we did in the afternoon, the previous exercise was at night).

Project Hyperessay 2: Concept & Teaser

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.

dictionary mindmap

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.

on pixels

An ongoing series of collage made for the dictionary project.

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. It’s time to pick them apart and give them a new lease of life. Melancholia and it’s friends are like glitches. Remixes, edits and filters rework these glitches and help assimilate them into normality.

glitches.remixes.edits.filters

To quote Franz Kakfa “One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.”

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 images. The addition of the planets, for example, is an allusion to early Internet art, part lo-fi, part ephemera. 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.

The whole process of digital manipulation in these collages began first with an image scanned from one of my journal.

Again, these whole idea of collaging, remixing and applying “glitches” to these images is a way to re-present melancholy, a performative way of acknowledging the temporal nature of these issues, and above all, a kind of celebration.

I will be adding text to accompany these collages.

That’s all I have for now.

#wip

Research Critique IV: Jon Cates ‘Bold3RRR’

It takes me a while to understand Jon Cates’ work, though from my own understanding of it, I see it as a theatrical piece of sort: specifically a monologue theatre. I am drawn to his dialogue, even if the screenshots is at first hard to understand. His spoken word is deliberately paced, and almost poetic at times “I want to reflect, I want to reflect, I want to reflect…” His inclusion of the noise and feedback sounds also contribute to the idea of this piece being a reflection of real-time: it represents the whole idea of “lagging” and how apparent it is in real-time video conferencing. I think it’s interesting he has chosen to embrace this technological error and include this in this piece because we inevitably go through such errors when engaging in these forms of communication. For example, we get that a lot in our Adobe Connect meetings in this class – such glitches are all part of what this is all about.

Another thing I’ve noted from the work is the idea of anonymity – similar to what Adriene Jenik mentions in her essay: “in virtual space, spatial and temporal bodies are masked and shrouded from view; it was fascinating to discover that shrouding ourselves instigated an emergence of people from behind their shadow online selves.” The image of Jon Cates is ambiguous and blurred, and even though we can see his screenshots and his actions on the computer, it does not offer the full picture. The images are monochromatic and so highly contrasted that they are whited out. Despite being denied of the physical identity, what is crucial is still being able to see his actions on the virtual space.

Micro-project V: Desktop World

This is my desktop. There’s nothing on my desktop at all for 2 reasons:

a) Everything on my computer is on Dropbox.

b) I like to open my laptop and be greeted with an image I love, without any icons blocking it. I also reduce the applications in dock to those that I use most frequently. I did this illustration during the summer break of 2014 and it’s one of my favourites. I was at a bar with my friends and I had an especially good time. I went home and did an illustration as a memory of that night – to me it reminds me that summer breaks are absolutely the best: having a good time with my friends, and having all the time in the world to do what I love.

Here’s my real “desktop” which is my main Dropbox folder. It’s very cluttered and I only do a clean up after the semester ends. Everything bit of data I have is on Dropbox. I can’t do without Dropbox and with it, I can work effortlessly on both on my desktop computer and laptop. It also saves me the trouble of constantly backing up my information on a portable disk. If my computers happen to crash, I don’t need to worry too much about the loss of data as well as everything I’m working on is always being saved and synced with the cloud server.

The “Projects” folder is probably the most important folder on my computer with all my life’s work.

Some projects that I am working on: the first is an illustration I completed for a magazine. The second one is my blog archive which I recently collated for my final project in this class as well as my Visual Communication core class.

So here you go! My desktop world is my workplace – a really busy and cluttered one.

Project Hyperessay 1: The Archiving Project

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.

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!

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