User:Lassebosch/reading writing methodologies/3 Trimester

Draft for essay

INTRODUCTION

In the following I will bring together three of my previous projects and a series of texts I've written the last year. While going trough each project, it becomes clear that there are fields of interests which spans across the entire 'body of work'. In unsorted key themes these are:

KEY THEMES

The peer/seeder, sharing/stealing, the crowd of the internet, patterns and the science of 'emergence', exploitation vs empowerment, control, prediction, shaping future, systematic simplification - cybernetic perception, crowd-control, surveillance, mimicking/imitation, individualism/collectivism, globalization, convergence, unification, mono-culture, gamification, post-industrial-labor, networks

PREVIOUS RELEVANT WRITINGS

'Future Map', Brian Holmes

'The Peer', 2'nd chapter, Cyburbia, James Harkin

'The Long Tail' - Mark Leckey

'The Guardian Angel', Opinion, 2. trimester.

http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/User:Lassebosch/reading_writing_methodologies/Annotations

http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/User:Lassebosch/reading_writing_methodologies/2_Trimester

PREVIOUS WORKS

1) Questioning Crowd-sourcing: The rise of the global day-laborer (2012-2013)

Engaging the online platform 99designs, I wrote a browser-based script which automatically enters and infiltrates the platform on my behalf.

99designs is one of many crowd-sourced design-producing internet services, critically referred to as 'logo-mills'. The majority of this type of online platforms provide a system for an individual or an entity to offer a design-related assignment. Presented as an open contest the assignment is released to an in-site crowd of designers, with winning prices ranging widely depending on the characteristics and scale of the assignment. The submitted designs are in most cases public visible.

Encouraged by the structure of the platform, individual designers enter fierce competition against each other. Inspiration edges towards plagiarism, creating a sour, hostile environment. This is all to the productive benefit of the contest-holder since thousands proposals are being generated freely, of which the preferred proposals ('star'-rated by contest-holder), constantly are being refined by the eager crowd, at the expense of the battered individual squashed beneath the ever higher reaching mass.

As a winner eventually is chosen, the payout (deducted substantial transaction and commission fees) leaves the lucky one victorious; he has conquered the glorified bounty, he has won the race, he might even get a small iconic badge or virtual gold-medal for his profile. An ultimate example of gamification.

The excitement of winning might overshadow the fact, that the salary per-hour-ratio is diminishing. Especially taken to consideration that hardly every competition you enter is won by you. All the losers, the actual crowd, is left unpaid, yet they frantically cling on, in hope to win the logo-lottery.

The automation-script enters the most popular contests available on 99designs and submits it's own proposals, thereby competing with and against the crowd of designers. The catch is, that instead of offering a solution for the contest-holder, the script submits propaganda-posters with worker-union-like slogans such as: 'PEERS UNITE', 'WE ARE ONE' and 'COMRADES OF THE SCREEN - JOIN FORCES'. It proposes a utopic, old-school, vision, for the crowd to join forces, unify and stand together against the 'oppressors'.

The core issue of the project revolves around the illusion of promised freedom, the empowerment or the total exploitation of the individual, and the fine line in-between. The post-industrial worker finds himself in flux between various environments and types of activities - on one hand offering refreshing change, on the other the pitfall of flexpolation - a term coined by 'flexibility' and 'exploitation'. Further complicating the issue is the question of resistance. Is it possible to unite the crowd, when the crowd is no longer locally centralized but in fact individuals spread across the globe? Can you find a common stand, when interests and individual circumstances do not have anything in common? The crowd has been dispersed. Passively each peer awaits the next existential battle, all aspiring to take home the promised prize.

2) TumblrJumpr (2013)

TumblrJumpr is a crawler-script that seeks to describe the amorphous network of Tumblr. As the script spins through Tumblr, the viewer starts to discover patterns and connections amongst the various Tumblr-niches or 'bubbles'.

Within their own cultural 'bubble', each blogger eagerly awaits the binary signal from their neighbour, arriving in the guise of a 'like', a 'reblog' or the 'comment'. Like ripples in water the mass of peers and seeders harmonically vibrate, spreading the cultural code as it eventually reaches the edge of the sphere.

Occasionally the spreading of code extends into the next 'bubble', inhabited by bloggers resonating to an entirely different frequency. Popular signals have been spread across the entire formation of Tumblr-bubbles, such as the omnipresence of cats, the use of animated GIF's, and recently the retro-aesthetics of Instagram.

The blogger, often fixed within his 'bubble', might be exposed to new environments through a sudden intersection with a passing signal. Yet he lacks the possibility to 'zoom' out, to look at the greater constellations of spheres, which comprises the shifting, unstable substance of Tumblr. Engaging this point, zooming out, is a principal topic in the completed part of the project and its purposed continuation.

Written as a 'crawler' and 'scraper' anchored within the domain of Tumblr, the TumblrJumpr spins around, exploiting the intersections amongst the 'bubbles', gradually uncovering the inherently ambiguous network of the phenomenon.

The project was recently presented as a physical installation, in which the script was modified to print a physical index of the inexhaustible journey. For each site visited, the script logs data such as time, date, Tumblr-URL, and creates a composition of the latests images of the corresponding blog.

The growing index currently comprises of a total of eight books, each representing a three hours of 'tumbling', approximately 330 pages per book.

As the journey of the Tumblrjumpr extends, a narrow view of the macro-structure of Tumblr progressively takes shape. Various patterns slowly emerge, bridges between spheres are being revealed some occurring almost naturally, others bizarrely unexpected. An array of questions appears from the autonomous exploration of Tumblr;

How to describe connections between spheres? Are they analyzable, even predictable? Is it possible to produce a more definite mapping of the macro-structure well aware of the amorphous nature of the substance? How does the sharing of signals take place? Throughout time is it possible to convey the potential rise and decay of different spheres? The same question could be posted to the meme-like usage of specific cultural codes.

3) A Shutterstock Voyage (2012)

A growing personal fascination for stock-photography and video turned into a longer period of intense examination, working with and against the phenomenon. The project took shape as a expanding set of web-based tryouts, each experiment involving some sort of interaction.

By examining stock-photos, two central 'parameters of success' was laid out; 1) Scalability 2) Emotional response

Scalability relates to the question of application; the more generic the content of the photo is, the more it sells. Examples:

• Most often stock photography refrains from depicting factual events. Instead it seeks portray particular moods, feelings or 'states of being' all known to western cultures: Success, happiness, melancholy, love, pain, etc.
• Environmental recognition removed
• Low field of depth: blurring out the background, while creating focus on key-elements

Emotional response relates particularly to use of color, saturation and brightness. Using these strategically leads to images which naturally attracts and craves attention from the eye. Some examples of usage:

• Super-brightness
• Super-saturated colors

The brightness is used to emphasize areas or restrain interest from others while super-saturated elements, often lips, eyes or foods of various kind, provokes attention of the eye.

Scalability pushes the emergence of the generic image - stripped off all layers of denotations only leaving emotional connotations. Acting as an empty frame or shell, the stock-photo embraces whatever input it is given and churns out an emotional-laden product.

The phenomenon encourages a plug-and-play implementation of cheap, fabricated images, which has gained enormous speed during the last ten years, allowing for everyone to participate in "A global marketplace for imagery, powering a new era of creativity". The flip-side of this phenomenon, with its media implemented across the entire globe in every medium; from newspapers to advertisements to electoral campaigns, is that it promotes and shapes a uniform, western-oriented, 'monocultural' and stereotypic view of the world, eroding difference and acceptance of it. The concept of 'Freedom' across the globe is now chained to the image of jumping, arm-stretching persons on green fields with sky-blue backdrop.

CONCLUSION - THE SUM OF ALL

The majority of my work explores the lines in which visual design is currently being produced on a global scale. From it's socioeconomic implications of shifting labor-practices and the precarious nature of design related jobs, to the onslaught of visual stimuli present on Tumblr.com, in which individuals attempts to achieve the 'unique' although the material they constitute them self on has been infinity reblogged. My interest in stock photography follows similar trail, and concerns it self with the emergence of global, generic image-perception, which endangers non-prevalent visions of being extinct.

(draaafty)

- How the impact of the internet, more broadly communication technologies, affects the way we act, structure and perceive our surroundings.

- How new paradigms dictates and predict modes of behavior and production; from usage of imagery to labor-structures to issues relating to sharing of culture and questions of individuality in an interconnected world.