User:ThomasW/Reflection on your practice

Reflection on your practice 090415

Cultural techniques of ephemeral optimization.

General note on mode of address. Write as if to someone not familiar with your work. Introduction Current Practice (resource: here you can use the descriptions of recent work) "Marshall McLuhan once suggested that ‘art was a distant early warning system that can always tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it’." (Gere, 2002, Page 116)

If people ask me about what my practice is, I cant really say.. either I can define is a multiple practices or a hybrid. For me the content will always dictated the result. As someone with a mix background and experiences its hard to nail down. From coming from a Graphic Design and Photography background / pratics and now more more into a digital realm ++++ "According to Derrida, any memory system can be called a form of writing, since it records information for the purpose of future transmissions" Page 5

My recent work is a digital photo book made in the e-ink format “”what is e-ink” I have the use of new and archive images of an abandon paper-mill to show the decline of the paper-mill. People forget the infrastructurer.. Both paper and digital media have physical infrastructure r and if the media dies the will be remains The images roll inn and out of the pages as if there are on a conveyor belt, this mimics how paper is made and also is a reference to off-sett litho printing that prints one colour at the time. Since the start of the computer age, it have been said that we are getting a ‘paperless office’ or need it. The ‘paperless office’ have yet to materialism, the term was first used in the article “The Office of the Future”, published in Business Week in June 1975. Paper is still being used for print and even with the increased usage of the computers and the internet. Since the start of the computer age, it have been said we are getting a ‘paperless office’.

Xerox was becoming alarmed at the idea of the ‘paperless office’, the revolution in business life that computers were, apparently, about to bring about. To meet this challenge Xerox decided to become part of the computer revolution itself. To this end it set up Xerox PARC on the West Coast of the United States." (Gere, 2002, Page 134) Gere, Charlie (2002) Digital Culture, London, Reaktion Books

Relation to previous practice

General note on mode of address. Write as if to someone not familiar with your work.

"It matters because we live i media, as fish live in water. ( Neslon, Page 306 ) From the age of 14 when I made my first computer magazine using a copy of MS Publisher 97, that the topic of sharing knowledge and information and the use of design and visual media was the thing I wanted to do in the future with my life. Time it lead me to different jobs in newspaper as a graphic designer, photographer and part time editor. Later a shift was need that lead me to the UK and a graphic design BA. One of my projects there was “The Library of Bable” The project was a response to a brief set by The International Society of Typographic Designers to create a typographic project on the theme of “everything about one thing.” My response to this brief discussed the theme of “Bit-Rot” aka Data Decay with the starting point focussing on the obsolescence of floppy disks.

Bit-Rot is something most people aren't aware of, but in a digital age this is a really interesting topic, as most people don't realise the how unstable digital media is as a format for storing information. “You can read a book that's 200 years old, but you can't read a computer file that was created 5 years ago” The format is based on the dimensions of the 8-inch floppy disk with the main body copy from the short story “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luís Borges; a short story about a library which contains every story ever written and that ever will be written and how this is stored.

I illustrated the book by corrupting it and its based on research of how corrupted files appear. This blend of typographic design, graphic design and research got me highly interested and gave me my goal for my future MA, how to inform people about the dangers of Bit-Rot. How it looks like we all are heading for digital dark-age.

“ If we loss the past, we will live in an Orwellian world of the presuppose present,” - Brewster Kahle

The topic came back and the urgency even in design field after a talk at TYPO in London in the fall of 2013 with the designer Hamis Muir from 8VO talked about their old magazine project of Octavo 92 and they made their last issue as an interactive cd-rom

“Octavo 92.8 was designed to run on a minimum specified Mac [...] The irony is that the pace of change of technology has left Octavo 92.8 largely inaccessible. Muir,(2005) Page 386

How does your current work connect to previous projects you have done? (resource: here you can use a) the descriptions of older work b) extracts from your interview.) General note on mode of address. Write as if to someone not familiar with your work.

Relation to a larger context

Outline practices or ideas that go beyond the scope of your personal work. Write briefly about other projects or theoretical material which share an affinity with your project. It is simply about showing an awareness of a broader context, which you will later build upon in your project proposal and writing component in the second year (resource: here you can draw on the texts from the interviews and from the session using Jstor and the sessions in which you examined a media, art object and a text.)

If people ask me if I am a designer or artist, I will always say designer before an artist for

“Design can critically engage the mechanics of representation, exposing and revising its ideological biases; design also can remake the grammar of communication by discovering structures and patterns within the material media of visual and verbal writing" (Miller, (1999) Page 23)

Content will dictate the visualisation, my personal taste is not the main focus

“ The growing use of symbols such as roadsigns and trademarks on a worldwide scale demands absolute clarity of expression. Its no longer possible to confine oneself to local tastes.” Munari (1966)

The topic of digital information and bit-rot is a growing topic, we store more and more information digitally but the longevity of it is not that long compared to paper.

"Yet digital culture brings with it a great paradox whereby it contributes as much to amnesia and collective forgetting as to remembering” (Joanne, (2011) p70 )

Digital is the new kid in town, but paper have lasted but the digital have not. " When we document something in the real world, we make fixed, permanent, immutable records of it. But computer documents are volatile, ephemeral constellations of data” (Stephenson, 1999, Page 63) the positives of digital information is that is infinite copyable, Like the Gutenberg press invented the mechanical reproduction, now with digital the access and easy of replation something is no longer in the hand of crafts men or experts.

“All forms of knowledge achieved stability and permanence, not because paper was more durable than papyrus but simply because there were many copies.”James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, 2011258 Page 118

Digital was said to be the death of print, but the death of print is not new.

“digital is built for speed, while print ensures stability” (Ludovico, Page 7)

We can trace the actual expression ‘paperless office’ back to an article titled The Office of the Future, published in Business Week in June 1975. (Ludovico, Page 25)

“Even the embarrassing failures of prophecy had been erased from the collective memory. Instead of re-examining their credibility, the key predictions of the 1964 New York World’s Fair were reworked many times to ensure that these old futures always looked like the latest thing. (Barbrook, 2007 page 202 )

Starting in the early 1980s (the beginning of the age of personal information) this ‘paperless’ research-and-development mantra would increasingly become a propaganda buzzword aimed at creating a large target market for selling information technology (IT). Marketing departments actively promoted a vision of massive magnetic archiving systems, destined to replace the huge amounts of messy paper, effectively de-cluttering the desktop once and for all. This meant a definitive shift towards systems of digital documents, existing only in windows on computer screens. (Ludovico, Page 26)

Before if you wanted to use digital technology you need to an expert, but now everyone uses a computer, but also the use of camera are.. we take more photos now then ever before.. what happens with the images...

“The family photograph functions primarily as a record as visible evidence that this family exist” Page (Joanne, (2011) p35 )

‘I live right inside radio when I listen. I more easily lose myself in radio than in a book,’ said a voice from a radio poll.” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964)

“Born between 1977 and 1996 inclusive, this generation is bigger than the baby boomers itself, and through sheer demographic muscle they will dominate the twenty-first century. While it is smaller in some countries (particularly those in the Western Europe), internationally the Net Generation is huge, numbering over two billion people. This is the first generation to grow up in a digital age.(Tapscoot, 2008, p46,47)

Digital technologies are disposable, and data is transient. (Gabrys, 2007 page 17

fetishizing—cultural techniques of optimization. "There is no sin in the lack of permanence, its not a bad thing that thing move on" – Jason Scott Even the embarrassing failures of prophecy had been erased from the collective memory. Instead of re-examining their credibility, the key predictions of the 1964 New York World’s Fair were reworked many times to ensure that these old futures always looked like the latest thing. Barbrook, 2007 page 202 General note on mode of address. Write as if to someone not familiar with your work.

Research strands

Keywords Media

Information

Ignorance

Digital

Print

Contrast

Decay

Physical

Shock

Books

Publisheing

DIY

Ephemral

Memory

Transmissino

Formats

Standards

Protocols

Remake

Technology

Formats

Objects

Defend / Battle

News

"The technological realities of today are already obsolete and the future of technology is bound only by the limits of our dreams" (Nelson, Page 307)

Post Digital Print – The future of print in a digital worldwide → print can get a new lease as archive format ? People still books, highly , more advanced books.? The personal archive- How can we prevent / stop digital decay → inform people How can design inform people abou the subject

"The computer is as inhuman as we make it. The computer is no more "cold and "inhuman" than a toaster, bathtub or automobile" Page 310

Our understanding of personal and public histories is structure through what Joese van Dijck has termed 'mediated mermories' (Joanne, (2011) p7 ) "Guardianship of the computer can no longer be left to a priesthood" (Nelson. Page 304 ) “trash is always our premier cultural export to the future.” Gabrys, 2007 page 111

‘the machine is always social before it is technical” - Gilles Deleuze (Gere, 2002, Page 19)

Consider the possibilities open to you and where you would take your work in the near future (resource: here you can draw on the texts from the interviews and from the session using Jstor) General note on mode of address. Write as if to someone not familiar with your work. Conclusion Consider the possibilities open to you and where you would take your work in the near future (resource: here you can draw on the texts from the interviews and from the session using Jstor)