User:Ada/Projectproposal

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⊹ ࣪ ˖ what do you want to make?

A body of written work about the virtual places that internally displaced people inhabit. It will ask three main questions:

- what happens to our sense of self when different identities cannot coexist inside us?

- how do alienated people find community and what are these communities like?

- what can this way of using the internet as a sacramental space tell us?

Through these questions it will explore the relationship between online communities and spirituality, focusing on how marginalised individuals find identity and belonging in virtual spaces. To do this, I will share people's stories of fragmentation, healing and support. The stories are backed and intermezzo-ed by theories about these people, places and moments written by social scientists, physiologists and theologians. A honest, guttural and soft portrayal of an online people.

Together with the written text, I'd like to build an homage to these places. Backplace is/will be a platform grounded in compassion, care and authenticity – mirroring the very qualities that turned online communities into havens for me and countless others. It's meant as a reflection of what online spaces offer us and what they don't. Breaking it down to only the parts of a platform that theoretically aid identity development, community and support it will stand as a reminder and digital love letter.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ why do you want to make it?

My life story might be my own, but my feelings have not been. As thousands others have, in the darkest of times I have found sanctuary in digital spaces. Virtual communities have offered me a profound sense of belonging, understanding, and even healing. They were the first places I've found companionship and understanding and to this day remain some of the only places to be witnesses to certain aspects of me. I'm not alone. I've witnessed firsthand the incredible transformation these communities can bring, shaping identities and providing solace for those who often felt marginalised by their physical world.

In today's internet landscapes these communities are rare, hard to access and built against frameworks put in place by programmers, designers and product owners. But they are there, because humans always find a way to make anti-human landscapes human-friendly, which is to say: full of care, softness and honesty. This is the only thing that matters to me.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ how do you plan to make it?

Describe how you will go about conducting your research through reading, writing and practice. In other words, through a combination of these approaches, you will explore questions or interests you have laid out in your general introduction. In this section you can help us understand how your project will come together on a practical level and talk about possible outcome(s). Of course, the outcome(s) may change as your research evolves, but it's important at this stage to have some concrete idea of how your project could come together as a whole.

Practically, it is a two-step process.

[ text ]

This text is very important to me as writing is a big part of my practice. I have been experimenting with narrative styles and story-telling devices and I plan to continue on doing that. The text uses data from conversations I've had and documented other people having but for the first part of the project I'd like to continue gathering more and talking with people more. It's an ongoing process of collection and digestion of information that I'd like to keep doing until the first draft is finished.

[ backplace ]

For the platform, I'm less sure. I have been experimenting with building the strictly-code part of it and plan on doing little steps at a time not to be overwhelmed. Generally, this brings up huge waves of impostor syndrome and discouragement as my ambitions and passion for building this sort of thing don't always match my skills. I will attempt as much as possible to use what I know and understand which is HTML, CSS, Phyton and Java libraries and hope this will somehow be enough.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ what is your timetable?

aaaaaaah

⊹ ࣪ ˖ who can help you and how?

👐🏽 I have received but will need the help and support of people in these backdoor online communities. I have found people to be less willing to talk about it to my body and more willing to talk about it to my computer so I will keep on doing that.

👐🏽 I'd like to contact Kendal who was previously in XPUB, as her graduation project also explored online places. I am not sure practically how she might help but I'd like to tell her about my project and talk to her about hers.

👐🏽 I will need quite a lot of help and support for the platform. Manetta and Joseph have been helping me as I experiment with using Flask to build login-pages and allow to store data but neither has worked with this kind of platform before. They suggested I maybe ask Michael and said he'd probably recommend using Django.

👐🏽 I would really love to find someone who has experience with building this kind of platform and ask them practical questions.

👐🏽 I can see that a big issue might turn out to be a lack of trust in my own abilities as a programmer so I'll ask my classmate stephen kerr if he can do what he has been doing for XPUB3 for me and look at my code and nod and tell me it looks fantastic as he is the better coder of xpub2 (and maybe offer advice but less important).

⊹ ࣪ ˖ relation to previous practice

This project borrows from a lot of the frameworks I've used before. I started my practice in the purely scientific field of communication science, but my interest in marginalised groups drove me to write my thesis about LGBTQ people and how represented they felt by mainstream media.

Once I joined XPUB, I felt a bit lost on how to connect my background in data research to art and design practices again. For my first project, I was part of the Garden Leeszaal project where I archived what people made in the workshop by scanning it and then bound it into a book. I didn't see it then, but now I know that my interest was ultimately in how people interacted with the books we provided and in recording their presence.

I felt more at home in our second project, where we made an healing toolkit. My personal interpretation of healing was Oracolotto, a deck of tarot cards based on my cultural heritage and dream interpretation. My personal conception of spirituality was and still is profoundly impacted by my own Italian esoteric heritage.

I then collaborated on a website that translated unicode into hex and emojis. It was part of a critique of unicode and an interest in symbolism and different modes of communication.

From there, I started exploring with unifying design and scientific practice by making a framework about how groups come together and apart based on research about worms. I made a website to share the principles.

My last project was a web-based video calling platform recreating the feeling of a call with a switchboard operator. It connected only two computers at a time and was specifically made to contact XPUB from New York, where I was.

This project borrows from all the previous roles I've worn. It's a text based in social science, psychology and theology focusing on communication, marginalised groups and spirituality. It's an archive of interactions reflecting my own history. It's also a web platform that uses the framework I have built and focused in care and spirituality.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ relation to a larger context

The project itself sits in a massive theoretical web, building on pre-existing knowledge situating technology as being here on earth with us(nature) rather than against us. It builds on the notion shared often online that social media as we knew it is dead (rip) and wondering what could come from it. It relates to any piece of work that saw relational healing as possible, community as necessary and the really delicate matter of belonging and mutual care as the most important thing there is.

It also sits, hopefully next to or at least on the step below, art and design made by people who saw the potential for digital spirituality and how a higher power can really be anything. It meets other projects on that plane of esoteric web that one can only find by spending a long time online and by desperately needing to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, to love and be loved back.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ references

Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. (2008) ‘The Cyber Worlds of self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and selves’, Symbolic Interaction, 31(1), pp. 33–56. doi:10.1525/si.2008.31.1.33.

Berlant, L.G. (2022) On the inconvenience of other people. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bridle, J. (2023) Ways of being: animals, plants, machines: the search for a planetary intelligence. New York: Picador.

Campbell, H. (2005) ‘Considering spiritual dimensions within computer-mediated communication studies’, New Media & Society, 7(1), pp. 110–134. doi:10.1177/1461444805049147.

Chile, L.M. (2004) ‘Spirituality and community development: Exploring the link between the individual and the collective’, Community Development Journal, 39(4), pp. 318–331. doi:10.1093/cdj/bsh029.

Delgado, C. (2005) ‘A discussion of the concept of spirituality’, Nursing Science Quarterly, 18(2), pp. 157–162. doi:10.1177/0894318405274828.

Fisher, J. (2017) Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. New York, New York: Routledge.

Gonzales, A.L. (2015) ‘Disadvantaged minorities’ use of the internet to expand their social networks’, Communication Research, 44(4), pp. 467–486. doi:10.1177/0093650214565925.

Haraway, D. (1985) ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review (US), pp. 209–240. doi:10.4324/9780203093917-25.

The Government Lab (2020) The power of virtual communities, The GovLab. Available at: https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/ (Accessed: 28 September 2023).

Mesch, G.S. (2011) ‘Minority status and the use of computer-mediated communication’, Communication Research, 39(3), pp. 317–337. doi:10.1177/0093650211398865.

Mowat, J.G. (2015) ‘Towards a new conceptualisation of Marginalisation’, European Educational Research Journal, 14(5), pp. 454–476. doi:10.1177/1474904115589864.

Smith, N., Wickes, R. and Underwood, M. (2013) ‘Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance cybercommunities’, Journal of Sociology, 51(4), pp. 950–967. doi:10.1177/1440783313486220.