User:Geo Barcan/writings

I am not making. I am questioning what *making* is for me. I am looking into the things that are relevant about the process of *“making”;* things that can be planted and can later sprout. I'm going through a period of research and narrowing down what I'm interested in because I get a lot of very different and sparse ideas that don't necessarily feed into each other. They are somehow like unborn babies because they are there, in the womb, they exist, but they never come to light. Each baby is from a different species. I'm trying to form this embryo that is more coherent and has a stronger root and that can be born into the world and grow and exist independently and have a path and its own life.

This comes from a period of puberty in my work; a transformation. I don't really relate to what I was doing previously and I think this is because I'm pretty young, I just turned 23. So what I'm doing now is getting back into a cocoon in order to come back differently.

Currently, I am focusing on what *the Internet is,* how do we navigate it, how do we exist on it, what are its aesthetics, its politics, its impact and how does it shape society and the contemporary world. There is this big misconception that there is a division between the virtual and the real but they actually merge so much to the point that they are the same thing. Therefore, I feel that in order to make sense of this reality I need to understand the machine that creates it, I need to speak its language. So now I am trying to learn coding and creative web design or interactive programming because I want to be able to speak the language of the world.

I'm doing it because it's part of my life. I’m a kid of the Internet. I grew up on the Internet and it influenced a big part of what I know and what I am today. Probably 70-80% of what I've learned is from the Internet. I got to the point where I started inquiring my past, my upbringing, my class, and I can barely separate them from the moment I got a computer. I come from a working-class family and a very backward, post-industrial city, where there was nothing to do. So I didn't have any access to culture, to exhibitions, to engaging in cool activities and such. Everything I know about art, about philosophy, about history, about all this kind of stuff, is from the Internet. 90% of the artworks I've seen that are relevant to me were on a picture on the Internet.

I'm going through puberty now 'cause I'm taking a different approach to what I'm doing. I think it is it is different not thematically maybe, but more practically, structurally.

Therefore, I am working on thinking.

I am like a matriarchy – making multiple babies – but not in the same womb- through the world wide web.

I’m rooting

I’m seeding

I’m pending

Instead of reading, reading, reading and then storing it in the folders of my mind- most probably for a short period of time, before everything gets absorbed by the black hole of forgetting, which only leaves me with the shadow of that information, I decided to take a different approach to doing research. To internalize and personalize the information, I have been putting it into images, collages that speak both about my experience and the theory. It all started with Vito Campanelli's book "*Web aesthetics"* and Hito Steyerl's essay's "*Too much world: Is the internet dead?",* where they discuss different aspects of the life on the web, but more precisely, one's identity in relation to being on the internet. According to Campanelli, "*the Self is actually a bunch of memes. (...) Men and women might deceive themselves that they are driven by a conscience or by a deep self, but they are nothing but meme machines (made of brain, body and memes)."* and Steyerl suggest that "*one cannot understand reality without understanding cinema, photography, 3d modeling, animation or other forms of moving or still image.* In the meantime, I started thinking about where it all started, about the beginnings, when the internet was still not in everyone's houses and when it was exciting and fun to surf the web. My nostalgia lead me to listen to a lot of Britney Spears and watching Paris Hilton's show *The simple life*. I kept jumping back and forth to internet eras and looking at the current one it is impossible not to think about fascism, so I kept digging into how this happened and I ended up looking into vaporwave, memes and the alt-right lexicon by one of the previous XPUB students.

Nevertheless, I gathered my personal information and the research into images and texts and decided I will collect this into the form of a zine. An early prototype can be found here: [1](https://geobarcan.hotglue.me/). Aesthetically, I was drawn to Olia Lialina's work and [2](https://www.cameronsworld.net/) and the relics of the Geocities they have been saving. This is due to the way part of me is negating the contemporary, shiny, boring, corporate looks of social media and the net in general, as well as the nostalgic feelings of when I was a teenager playing dress up games and sims 2 with my friends, and making fake Yahoo Messenger accounts to anonymously talk to the boys in our school.

All the information I have been gathering will hopefully later result in a bigger project. The zine is a way of approaching research differently and visualizing ideas as well as sharing and contextualizing them.