Assessment4me
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⊹ ࣪ ˖ what is this project?
My graduation project is called Backplaces it's a digital collection exploring the stories of people who have found safety and connection in hidden corners of the internet. It's web anthology made up of different stories, poems and love letters coming from these hidden places and anonymous people. The aim of the collection is to explore the dynamics of online anonymity, revealing how it nurtures vulnerability; to pay tribute to how marginalised people misuse web frameworks to construct personal narratives and goes into the deep connections formed through these narratives.Practically it's a series of webpages using html, css and javascript to engage with the content I have collected. The data I am taking and re-interpreting comes from messages, comments, survey responses and a long email conversation; some of them are my own and a lot comes from anonymous others.
Before I show you the working prototypes I have, let me share my strategy and methods.
⊹ ࣪ ˖ how will I make this?
This project has three main areas of work.
- One is what I've been doing so far and will keep doing but less intensely until the end of December, which is gathering data and doing theoretical research on hidden online community and connection. This also plays into my thesis, which is a more in-depth theoretical work on the same subject. - The second I've just begun doing but will from now on be a bigger focus, which is the writing and prototyping of the actual stories on paper (or more like my notes app and the wiki)
- The third part is the actual coding of each separate webpage and the re-imagining of the infrastructure of the collection. I've been working and will keep working mostly on the basics for a while, the closer I get to April the more actively I will work on making the pages functioning. After that it will just be tweaking and testing with friends.
⊹ ࣪ ˖ how did I get here?
This project to me has been very clearly informed by all my previous work. It's a combination of methods of practice and topics I have touched upon on the past. I come from a scientific background in communication science and data research, with an interest on representation of marginal groups in media. Within xpub I experimented with methods and artistic practice quite a bit but my role in two of the special issues revoleved around how people interacted with our work, with technology and with their own vulnerability in a very broad sense because I am running out of time. The last project I made was a web-based video calling platform recreating the feeling of a call with a switchboard operator. It connected only two computers at a time and was specifically made to contact XPUB from New York, where I was. It was part of a process of contextualising modern technology by learning what came before it and questioning why things are they way they are now. This brought me to think of the possibility of personalising web-based interaction by rethinking social platforms.