User:Marlon/projectproposal

Okt 16, 2013

Introduction

Again, in multiple directions:

• Starting from .NFO-files and Samsung commercials, I'm looking into 'template culture': do the websites, apps, platforms and software we use really offer us a way to 'design our lives'? What are we online, people or avatars? Do we really have any control over these tools or do they just offer us different templates with minimal customization options? Is this personification just an illusion? Is it superficial? How does this relate to lifestyle and advertisement?

• Related, but a somewhat different issue: user-generated content, amateur artwork created with existing tools, within restricted areas/communities. Not for profit, not always strictly legal either. For example, movie subtitles, Harry Potter fanfiction, Photoshop actions for download, Youtube reviews, Instagram beauty pageants.

• My research should also focus on form, on the graphic/visual language of digital culture, the boundaries and technical limitations of a medium. Recontextualizing, repurposing, reusing, media filters.

Relation to previous practice

Pirate Bay Archive:

Karel Bilek created an archive of the Pirate Bay, a website that indexes (illegal) content available for download. The archive, an 75MB .XML file (a format used to store data), contains over 1,6 million links to torrent files. That would make it possible to recreate The Pirate Bay if it would ever be taken offline. As a very simple exercise I randomly displayed one item of the list on a website, with a link to the download. This gives users access to an enormous amount of content, but without the 'search option' it loses almost all its functionality. I appreciate the idea of a relatively small file representing such a vast amount of content. What other uses could it have, besides being the basis of a search engine like website?

.NFO-files:

.NFO files are a prominent tradition within the file sharing subculture. In the past the limited technical possibilities set boundaries for how the file looked and although the software used to create these files has developed significantly, the overall look of an .NFO file has remained the same, all due to its nostalgic value.

As a graphic designer, I am impressed with how the creators of these files manage to construct something great with very little: a limited toolbox of white on black or black on white symbols is used to make impressive pieces of work. Though most of the .NFO files are kept clean and simple, some show elaborate drawings and typography – the files have changed from a necessity to a form of expression. It is the "corporate identity" of individuals or groups of people that manifest themselves online.

Peer-to-peer-to-Peer-to-peer:

A collage of images, downloaded via Google Images and printed on seperate pages, that symbolize peer-to-peer networks. The printed pages overlap, connecting the peers of one diagram to those of another, forming a larger network of peer-to-peer networks.

Peers can form a network of nodes in which they share data peer-to-peer, without any central coordination. Currently the term "peer-to-peer" is at the height of its popularity, something you see reflected in the striking amount of images visualising the system that circulate the Web. Though the system stays the same, its use is in constant development. This "evolution" can be observed when looking at these images: the older images are smaller in file-size, with low-tech graphics depicting desktop computers, while the newer versions illustrate the increasing social impact of the peer-to-peer system.

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Tsunami by proxy

An older, but similar project, focused on virality in relation to the World Wide Web. It is a collection of around 1200 postcards, printed with popular images found online that depict the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. (Natural) disasters are visual stories and the images that most accurately capture the imagination of the viewer are very popular online, even if they are stills from movies or images from other disasters.

Bibliography

Books

Andrejevic, M (2004) Reality TV
Chapter Two: The Promise of the Digital Revolution

Practical steps

October/November:

To avoid getting stuck in thinking, reading and conceptualizing, I've started making (very) small projects. Projects that are finished in a day, sometimes in an hour. These are experiments in different forms across a selection of media, that have so far generated mostly visual output. The process and results will be documented in a work log, even when they're 'silly', 'superficial', unoriginal or complete failures. Hopefully in four weeks I have accumulated quite a number of smaller projects, of which one or two could lead to further investigation and eventually turned into a bigger, conceptually stronger project.

Here follows a list of ideas, which all focus on the idea of recontextualizing online content: by extracting it from the Internet, changing the medium, or by making something digital physical. Online/offline, static/dynamic.

1. I will look into NFO-files, as a way to research limitations and restrictions. An NFO-file creator has a 'toolbox' that only contains 95 printable characters. This project consists of (small) experiments, investigating the possibility of making an .NFO-file physical (or extracting it from its original frame: the software programs that can 'read' them). The ASCII characters function as the building blocks of an .NFO-file, but what will happen if these characters are replaced with different symbols or physical objects?

2. What does your Instagram filter say about you?* What is an Instagram filter? What does it look like outside of its social networking smartphone context? Could you filter an empty image, space, another filter?

2b. Instagram pageants. #rateme, #rankme, #beautycontest.

3. Pirate Bay Archive: research in to an aspect of the file, but not the content. Is there a way to visualize both the small size of the archive and the amount of content it gives access to?

4. An endless loop of 'loading' images.

References

• What does your Instagram filter say about you?