User:Lassebosch/reading writing methodologies/3 Trimester

Draft for essay

KEY THEMES

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

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) 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.

2) Questioning Crowd-sourcing (2012-2013)

Being introduced to crowd-sourced, design-generating platforms, I've started speculating on the characteristics of post-industrial labor.

Often referred to as 'logo-mills', the majority of this type of online platforms provides 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 generally ranging from 99$ to 299$ (depending on the characteristics and scale of the assignment).

Individual designers enters fierce competition amongst each other. Encouraged by the structure of the platform they find inspiration in each others design-proposals, often edging towards plagiarism, creating a sour, hostile environment between each designer, to the productive benefit of the contest-holder; thousands proposals are being generated freely, of which the preferred ('star'-rated by contest-holder), constantly are being refined by contestants.

As a winner eventually is chosen, the payout of the contest-price, deducted a fee dedicated to the owners of the platform, leaves the price-taker victorious; he has conquered the bounty, he has won the race, he might even get a small iconic badge or gold-medal for his profile. An ultimate example of gamification.

The excitement of winning might overshadow the fact, that salery-per-hour-ratio, which at times 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 core issue 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'.

3) 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.