User:SN/Thesis outline
Tatiana Chernigovskaya scientist in the field of neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and theory of mind in one of her lectures said: "We are what we remember." Our memory is not a box with pictures or any other kind of information, not a library or database; our memory is the processes that take place in our brain. These processes are always new. They change who we are, and technology changes them.
Smartphone and laptop have become an essential part of my life. I used to think that they help me to expedite my work. Apps with smart interfaces, plugins, and scripts that are used to optimize my workflow. But at some moment this tools stopped to be just tools, I became dependent on them. They transform the way I work, think and feel.
All my previous works the same as my current project I'm working on highlight distortion and state its inevitability in any technology, any digital media. There are characteristics common to most of my works: Set of rules, applied to the data and repetition in the process.
TO UNFOLD GENERATIVE ART, RULES. STARTING FROM SOL LE VITT.
In my previous works, I was playing with specificities of different medias, transformed and applied one on another to reveal this distortion, to create a situation for errors to emerge. My projects were based on the set of roles that directs process. Sketch #004 is a video installation I made for the exhibition in Eye Museum. The piece is an outcome of several stages of manipulations of silent films which mimics the formalities of the indexing methods within the archive. My project is a creative point of view on the specificities of the storing and preserving methods and its influence on items that are stored. The categorisation processes distort the understanding of the narrative content of the silent film the same way the formal characteristics of the video distort the sound. The sound is built using granular synthesis principles and resonates with black and white video pieces from 1920's.
TO UNFOLD ERROR.
As an exercise for the Thematic project, we were asked to create An E-book that concatenates previous records of graduation projects. We were looking at the process as our subject, which seeps into our method. Documentation of documentation of document creates distortion and buries original object and its attributes under the layers of documentation specificities and its media attributes. Being focused on the process of documentation, we decided to pick scanning as a method and general strategy to work with content. Scanning as a process is very fragmented yet systematic with the aim of creating the exact copy of the object. But when you are scanning the scanner has no idea of the whole, the image is that of the fragmented images. We implemented scanning as a conception on different types of documentation objects. To underline disruption while documenting, while we are scanning something, there exists the framework - even it is successful or unsuccessful - just doing it once. I was working on "scanning" documents. This process brings to the surface and exaggerates all kinds of errors caused by machine malfunction and human factors. These errors reveal new aesthetic, produce unforeseen results.
TO UNFOLD REPETITION.
TO MENTION BLACK AND WHITE PERFORMANCE.
THE ART OF COPY PAST
Streaming media (including any virtual reality and interactive) reduce the degree of involvement. An overabundance of sensory information inhibits the active involvement of the human in the co-creation. Media is filling in missing links explaining what should be "synthesized" by imagination. Our imagination loses in a fight with modern technology. We are thought to become managers rather than creators.
Kenneth Goldsmith starts his book "Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age" by altering Douglas Humbler's quote: “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more,” reducing the role of the author to a manager, who rephrases and reorganizes other’s words. "The problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours." Following an example of Marjorie Perloff and her unoriginal genius he establishes the term of uncreative writing, underlying that nowadays texts differs from each other in their ‘technical’ aspects, the way author "conceptualized and executed his writing machine."
During his classes of "Uncreative Writing" in the University of Pensylvania Goldsmith penalized students who tried to be creative and original. "Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become an expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed regarding responsibility instead of recklessness." (Goldsmith, iBooks) He found creativity not in their texts but in the way they choose what and how to reframe, proving that “the suppression of self-expression is impossible”. (Goldsmith, iBooks) So the concept of ‘creativity’ hasn't become obsolete but transformed in compliance of new realities. In other words, creativity goes not with the object but with the method, the way the object was created. In the era of Internet and computers “even if literature is reducible to mere code—an intriguing idea—the smartest minds behind them will be considered our greatest authors.” (Goldsmith, iBooks) Due to the development of modern technologies and new medias the 'art of Copy-Past’ in literature has become the major trend that generates many works “proclaiming that context is the new content”. (Goldsmith, iBooks) In his book Goldsmith cites as an example a poem that consists of shopping mall store list rewritten in poetic form or the work that put together status updates in social networks with names of deceased writers, or Flarf, the new movement in writing that accumulates the worst of Google search result. The new gender has its charm and evokes emotions and connotations as the reaction on the writing process itself.
Untitled originally was a performance made by Pleun and me during the thematic seminar "Chain reaction." Pleun and I played on the field of combinatory literature and chain reactions. We looked at the way Youtube autoplay and Google method of crawling the internet works and took it as a starting point. My role as an author was to establish the rules for the process, define the amount of freedom and randomness in the code that would create situations in which the error could emerge. This way the error becomes an inevitable part of the work. The result is a list of words with or within a connection among them. The reader and its subjective interpretation create connections between words. The computer pretends to be a human; human pretends to be a computer, and in between, there is a spectator who creates connections and interpretations.
In my graduation project, I continue to experiment in the field of generative design. I apply methods and practices I used before to reflect on the theme of relations between me and technology. In my intention is to gather data, analyze and use in data visualization. I'm researching different practices and tactics to find the best visual expression of the anxiety about losing myself in a digital routine, the feeling of void and chaos.
Relationships between humans and machines, the way technology are changing and overriding us always were a theme for the discourse. The speculations on this topic can be found in popular culture, scientific articles, cultural and social studies. Nicholas Carr in his essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" wrote: "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going – so far as I can tell – but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think." Carr states that every information technology brings a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. The Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from any available source. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.
Are these changes bad or good?