Description of my works int past year

25.09.2012 - STILL WRITING

Rewind and go back to what I did last year. Do not trow it out of the window. An effort should be made to find out common points and reoccurring topics.

To begin with I started by writting on the performativity of code. Departing from Katherine Hayle's notion of code performativity and I went on looking at how does code perform us, how it has the capacity to change things, to create performative acts, similarly to speech-acts, but with a more direct and materia effect. The text also boroughed ideas from Douglas Rushkoff 'Program of Be Programmed', addressing how heavy technology users most of us are, and how little do we know about and interveen on that same technology.

Simultaneously I developed and online map of the streets of Rotterdam. This map - a striped-down version of the map of Rotterdam - displayed only the city street names against a black background on the browser. By clicking on each street a request was made to the City of Rotterdam's Archive to provide information on that particular street's name origin. That information was then displayed alongside the map.

What I appeare to be doing here was an interface that would approach the city's archive through a different channel. By having the indexes of the archive - the street names - displayed on my screen I might see and as for information on streets that I wouldn't be normally interested in knowing about. It opened up the possibility for a serendipitous navigation throught the archive.

The same serendiptous exploaration principal made its way to the next project, the next work - Radio Liberté Egalité Beyoncé. RLEB was an online radio with a schedule composed from audio content fetched form Internet Archive. One-hour long cycles presented the listener with ten-minutes chunks of various sound materials, picked at chance, from a specific categories, such as french talk-shows, hiphop, poetry readings, ambient music, etc. The design of website where RLEG was hosted presented a drawing of radio, with which the listener had to interact in order to get the radio playing.

The essay written alongside the RLEB began by tracing the archive's historical ties to power as a legitimator of power and knowledge, and constituted according to an ideology. It ephasized the fact that archives, even folkloric archive such as Youtube, do have an idiology behind them, which can be perceived through what is kept from entering the archive.However, in the essay I mention two an important difference between an physical offline archive and a digital online one : the latter allow and wider access, and being digital it allow its item to be taken by visitors, without empovrishing it. These difference result in an open door for the individuals' appropriation and transformation of the archive.When one of its items is taken and transformed, a version of it appears, and a certain confusing emerges over its origin - what is the original what is fictious?. The remixed versions by surfacing with its transformed form and changes the archive into a space of dialogue, a site of emergence of discourses, rather than a site aimed at legitimazing power and knowledge. The essay goes on mentioning artistic projects that try to address and remix large chunks of online archives, which only cannot be accomplished by the work of one sol indiviual, but require the intervension of computer code to complete. Couriously code is in these case put to perform to bring more humane side to archive, to extend the poetry of the archive. But that also show that code can perform on a level quite beyou human reach.

Data Factory
- Looked at direct marking the aquision of consumers data in order to target them with products which they might be more inclined to buy
- It consisted of a small archive of recordings from phonecalls made to direct marketing companies in which I tried to sell them the central ingriend of their business - consumer data - only that the consumer here was only me.
- Through the reactions to this simple short-circuit the idiology behind this business model became apperant.
- The calls were gathered together in a website, with a certain corporate style, in which they could be listened, joined by so pictures illustrating or ridiculizing what was being said.

Essay: the work of audiences
- Revolved around Dallas Smythe the concept of the work of audiences:
  - creating demand for advertised goods
  - what advertisers buy when placing a advert on a magazine, TV-show of website is audience's attention and capacity to buy what is being advertised to themselves
- And the work of audiences is even more directly explored in web 2.0, where audiences begin working by producing alot of the contents that make up the web2.0 themselves
- However I ask if there are difference between structure like Youtube and one like Wikipedia, being both the product of audiences work. The answer offered to this question is that lies in that fact that a project like Wikipedia apart from being non-profit allows audiences to engage with it in more through way, having to understand and discussing how the plaform works. It is still work, but more conscious, and engaged.

- defended: platforms that not only give/feed the audiences but engage audiences in their constituiton are an alternative to the presented model of audience's work.

in common

heavy tech users (text 1) - necessity to understand and interveen in the technology; stoping being audience that works for to become audience (if the term still possible to use) that work on