User:ThomasW/Reflection on your practice

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Reflection on your practice 27.05.15

Cultural Techniques Of Ephemeral Optimization

"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, p116)

I see myself really as a generalist, I don’t really like to keep my interest and skills narrow. I try to learn something new, things that interest me over a broad context of visual media.

My most recent work is a digital photo book that is made in the e-pub format and its being shown on a e-ink screens, e-ink screen at not normally a format that are use as format to show photos since it have a really low resolution screen, but I am using it limitation to my advantage. I used new and old archive images of an abandon paper-mill to show the decline of the manufacturing of paper. People often forget the hidden infrastructure behind media production. Both paper and digital media have a physical infrastructure and if the media dies, the will be physical remains somewhere.

Previous practice

"It matters because we live i media, as fish live in water. (Neslon, 2003 , p306 )

From the age of 14 in 2000 when I made my first computer game magazine, the topic of sharing knowledge and information with the use of visual design have been a thing for me. My inspiration comes from all over, pop culture, design history, theory, sciences and other designers, film makers, photographers.. or just walk down the street and see something new that makes the brain tick.

While doing my BA in Graphic Design I did a project called “The Library of Babel” 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 was to discussed the theme of “Bit-Rot” aka Data Decay with the starting point focussing on the obsolescence text. 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 how unstable the digital media is as a format for storing information for you can read a book that's 300 years old, but you can't read a computer file that was created 5 years ago.

The format of the book 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 really interested and gave me my goal for my future MA, how to inform people about the dangers of Bit-Rot so we don’t end up with collective digital amnesia.

“ If we loss the past, we will live in an Orwellian world of the perpetual present” - Brewster Kahle , Digital Amnesia, vpro

The larger context

“It must be understood that as long as art stand aside from the problems of life it will only interest a very few people.” (Munari, 1966, p25)

Since the start of the age of mechanical reproduction we are overwhelm by media, but how do we sort the information and archive it for the future? Sometimes it goes wrong. We need to re digitize images that was done in the 1990s, film studios put digital films on analog film stock. There is a growing tendency that if you want to preserve something, you have to go back to pre digital formats as this is the only thing we know last for a generation.

"Digitization does not amount to preservation but is typically a means of convenient short-term access. Second, film, videotape, and digital content must be preserved or at the very least maintained-in order to ensure the long-term survival of texts and future access for audiences.” (Hilderbrand, 2007 ,p6)

The questions is time scale. Do we think in a political way of every three to six years or a generation term or beyond as in 100-1000 year perspective. I that thinking in a generation or two is the most productive.

"Yet digital culture brings with it a great paradox whereby it contributes as much to amnesia and collective forgetting as to remembering. "[..] to boom in memory were inevitably accompanied by a boom in forgetting?" (Joanne, 2011, p70 )

By preservation it, we lay the foundation for the next generations and then we can hope that the next generation is smarter then use.. but humans tend to repeat things... stupid things. A lot of we know about the past society comes not from government archives, but from small personal collections of newspapers, postcards and diary’s, but how will future generations look back to the early days of digital society if there is no record? “The family photograph functions primarily as a record as visible evidence that this family exist” (Joanne, 2011, p35 ) Now people think that everything is the in the cloud, and that you can just goggle the answerers, the physical library’s are getting “optimized” away by austerity and the mislead by over promises of the cloud.

The irony in the world of digitization and the optimization of content deliver that the book still keeps it position, if something is printed then the information is taken more highly in regard then on the web. A printed book is fixed, but a website can be change in seconds. The more copy that exists, the less of valuable it feels. Art book are for examples highly sort after now and exist in few numbers, a book as Twentysix Gasoline Stations by artist Ed Ruscha that have been printed in a few 100s copies since 1960s but still exist in a high number, but the flyer from last concert is quickly to the thrown away, so what is more valuable and rare?

There have been some attempt in design to make people aware, on of them was the The Deleted City by Information designer Richard Vijgen. Its a project where Richard visualise a city map of the remains of the online community GeoCities. GeoCities was one of the early platforms for everyone to publish websites for free and introduces a lot of people to the way of making websites. The project visualises the websites as a city-map, where you can hover over and check out the different neighbourhoods as a city map.

“Digital is built for speed, while print ensures stability” (Ludovico,2012 ,p7)

The Rosetta Project was created by The Long Now Foundation, the LongNow Foundation works of in the framework of the next 10,000 years. The project goal is to preserve human language for the future by engraving them into nickel alloy discs and disrupting them around the globe. Rick Prelinger is a known archivist and film maker, sitting an a large collection old ephemeral film, he have made films based his collection like the documentary film like Panorama Ephemera.

DoveType was a typeface made by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson at the Dove Press around 1900, this typeface was presupposed dead and gone after they where thrown into the river Themes after the press went bankrupt, Thomas wanted not the typeface to go into a mechanical press. In recent times the typeface have been brought back to life with the help of Robert Green who after searching for it found 150 pieces of type on the bottom of the themes and are now digitization it.

"[W]ithout cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from it successes and failures [..] " (Gard-Hansen, (2011), Page 70 )

Where It is heading

"The technological realities of today are already obsolete and the future of technology is bound only by the limits of our dreams" (Nelson, 2003, p307)

A lot of the problem at the moment is that technology are all mysterious for people. Maybe the key problem in solving the questions is to demystify the storage formats, to reveal its secrets. How many knows that a hard-disk got mechanical parts? or that CDs are two parts plastic and one part metallic film or that magnetic media have a finite lifetime? Are people to dazed by new technologies that we forget or don’t care about yesterdays technology?

“trash is always our premier cultural export to the future.” (Gabrys, 2007 p111)

To tell people to backup after it has happens is not helping, to get to them before it happens will help. How much information is good to forget? Is it important to save it all? One of my current projects are “My Hard-Drive Died” its a project where I want to use other peoples feelings on data loss to inform people the dangers of not backing up and not caring about ones data. I am using the online platform of Twitter to collect them. 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 p202 )

I am developing the project and other, got an urge to make something interesting but also something more than cool visuals, but something that communicate that we need to be more tough full of the history we are making, that if we are not careful we will have no history to send forward to the next generations..

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future, Design is therefore responsible for the world our children will live in” - Robert L. Peters (Berman, 2013, p127)

How all of this will end up in a final project I do not yet know, how big subjects need a lot of thinking and experiments, I am going to focus on the personal, the society, big business and broken promises or peoples attitude. Are they again all the same, I am still trying to figure out.

Reflection on your practice 15.04.15

Cultural techniques of ephemeral optimization.

"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 it can be define is a multidisciplinary practices. For me the content will always dictated the result. As someone with a mix background and experiences its hard to nail down.

"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-book format, e-books are digital books that are shown on a screen that use magnets and not back-light....

I used of new and old archive images of an abandon paper-mill to show the decline of the paper-mill. People often forget the hidden infrastructure behind media. Both paper and digital media have an physical infrastructure and if the media dies the will be physical 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 with an overlay.

Since the start of the computer age, it have been said that we are getting a ‘paperless office’ or that we need one. 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 we still have not stopped using paper. 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

"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 the publishing tool MS Publisher 97, the topic of sharing knowledge and information with the use of visual design have been a thing. Time did lead me to different jobs in a few newspaper as a graphic designer, photographer and part time editor at one point. 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 300 years old, but you can't read a computer file that was created 5 years ago” The format of the book 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 is not just in a xxxxx area, it exist in design field after a talk at TYPO in London in the fall of 2013 with the designer Hamis Muir from design studio 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.)

Relation to a larger context

Digital Obserlessions and amensia (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.) 1.Outline practices or ideas that go beyond the scope of your personal work. " 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) For me visual communication exist for transmit information xxxx to the reviver, “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) What the need for preservation of you information or data? Archives exist as a xxxx reord, archives can be big institutions or your own personal photo-album, but what happens if we loos our images to digital obeserlessions? Or if we loss or written communication for the future? “The family photograph functions primarily as a record as visible evidence that this family exist” Page (Joanne, (2011) p35 ) A lot of we know about the past society comes not from xxxx records, but from small personal collections of newspapers, postcards and diary’s, but how will future generations look in the millennial if there is no record? Are we heading in the way of the anglo saxons or mayas? "Digital culture brings with it a great paradox whereby it contributes as much to amnesia and collective forgetting as to remembering” (Joanne, (2011) p70 ) People thing that everything is the in the cloud, and that you can just google the answerers, Physical library’s are getting optimization away by economics away. 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 ) POST PRINT Phycialty of media “digital is built for speed, while print ensures stability” (Ludovico, Page 7) The irony in the world of digitization and the …... print is that print is getting more valuable. If something is printed then the information is taken more highly in regard then on the web. Digital is easy to copy, print is not so but it seems “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 The more copy that exists, the less of valuable it is, Art book are for examples highly sort after now and exist in few numbers, but a book as Twentysix Gasoline Stations by artist Ed Ruscha that got printed in ex in 1963 still exist in a high number, but a newspaper from yesterday or the flyer from last week club event is quick to the thrown away and maybe got not existing copy left. As print is still the most easy way and still most stable way xxxx to makes copy’s it still exist with highly valued even the time of the “paperless office” 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). (Ludovico, Page 26) –--. 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) Digital is the new kid in town, but paper have lasted but the digital have not 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. Digital was said to be the death of print, but the death of print is not new. 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...

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

Reflection on your practice 09.04.15

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)