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TWO (revised)

🎀 why do you want to make it?

If you know where to look you will find little corners of the internet, now harder to find than ever, where anybody can meet other lost users. These places help people find a sense of belonging, community and a way to express their identity that they would not be able to find in their physical reality.

In today's internet landscapes these places are rare, hard to access and built against frameworks put in place by the programmers, designers and 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.

🎀 what do you want to make?

A written body of work. In it, I want to share what I saw and still see, what online groups gave me and others. I want to talk about virtual spaces built by people to aid their own spiritual, social and mental wellbeing. I want to write the stories of people who had no body to tell their story to, but had a keyboard, a camera and the ability to navigate the internet. A honest, guttural and soft portrayal of an online people. I want to explain to others why this happens and why this matters.

I also want to build an homage to these places. A platform built within this paradigm of humans caring for each other. Pro-human technology, digital safe place. Because this is reflecting my own experience, it will reflect the aesthetic choices of the digital places that made me feel safe.

🎀 how do you plan to make it?

1. Read the articles I collected about marginalised groups online and virtual communities.
2. List all the communities, find out ways to navigate anonymity(!).
3. Make a survey and share it with people who might have been/are a part of these communities.
4. Interview individuals I know about their experience with VC (this involves finding people online and irl)
5. Find patterns, dig through the information I have to build a thesis.
6. Navigate and note what made the platforms that hosted these communities right for doing so (Ask people in these communities what they would want from a platform in the survey).
7. With this information, decide where to host my own digital safe space and what kind of platform is best suited.
8. Design and program the platform, mess around and have fun with it until something happens.

🎀 what is your timetable?

- 25/09 = Write a message to people within my own online communities, contact people who I used to contact too.

- 26/09 = Read and summarise the articles. Bring the books home with me(oopsie)

- by first week of October = contact all the people I wanted to, write down/record interviews (so far, marta, catarina, maybe sara, quinn, twt groups i'm part of). ask around on people still active on these sites too! club penguin, tumblr, idk where else.

- by 9/10 = map out some sort of pattern of what these people enjoyed, what brought them there, general useful information.

- after 9/10 = start applying the foundational research to my prototyping process. (today: ask joseph what he thinks about if it makes sense to only start thinking about the platform once I have all the interviews or if I should already mess around with it?)

🎀 who can help you and how?

I hope to find out more people(artists, writers and coders) who work with and within online communities and deal with digital life without seeing it as a plague on human society. I think I will need the support of Joseph and Manetta with the actual functionality of the platform and with deciding what technology best supports my ideas.

🎀 relation to previous practice

Funny how it all somehow relates back to what I've done both in the course and outside it. Feels like a natural follow-up. I went from fine-arts to quantitative social science and found peace in the defining, operationalising and framework-building of it.

During the first special issue I felt lost and resorted to helping people archive their work, finding that reflecting people back to themselves was easier.

In the second I felt more at ease and made a deck of oracle cards and wrote an accompanying booklet that reflected my interest in the esoteric, the subconscious and personal and cultural symbols.

For the last one, I made an emoji translator then a scientific framework around how groups come together and apart and lastly a digital webcam platform to communicate with xpub back at home. Now the project finally ties on how interested I am in community and its dynamics, personal growth and scientific frameworks to art.

🎀 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/bibliography

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.

Gaglio, A. (2021) The importance of online communities - how has social media revolutionised safe spaces?, TEDx Warwick. Available at: https://www.tedxwarwick.com/post/the-importance-of-online-communities-how-has-social-media-revolutionised-safe-spaces (Accessed: 21 September 2023).

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.

Hamburger, E. (2023) Social Media is doomed to die, The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/18/23672769/social-media-inevitable-death-monetization-growth-hacks (Accessed: 21 September 2023).

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.

Petrozzi, G. (2021) Digital Esoterism Or to be a Witch in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Institute of Networked Cultures. Available at: https://networkcultures.org/longform/2021/11/15/digital-esoterism-or-to-be-a-witch-in-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/ (Accessed: 19 September 2023).

ONE

⭐ what? (two sentences)

a workshop (knitting circle, coven meeting, archetype excavation) to find collective digital symbols that brought us closer to others and to ourselves.

the goal is to end up with an archive of very personal symbols for our digital growth.

⭐ how? (two sentences)

i talk about what digital symbols meant to me and show examples that i printed out on little circles. People can start from those to come up with three more symbols and write them down.

We talk about it and then then find three more, then share why they helped us and how they mattered.

⭐ workflow (two or three sentences)

seek people whose personal growth was heavily influenced by the internet and who'd be willing to come to the workshop.

create a safe intimate space to meet, write and talk.

afterwards, hopefully compile a list of symbols and go from there.

⭐ timetable (Sept 23-July 24)

have the workshop on 29/09 on the full moon.

first week of october: i revise and write about the list

from then i do something different and way better and super cool that i'll dream about soon

⭐ relation to previous practice (two sentences, draw on Text on Practice)[edit | edit source]

I started the course making an archive of people's interactions at our workshop, then I made a tarot card deck based on my specific cultural symbols and archetypes and finally realised the most interesting part of it all is really just people.

I want to merge them all in this and also incorporate the nostalgia I have for early internet communities and the growth they brought me.