User:Ada/Projectproposal

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⊹ ࣪ ˖ what do you want to make?

Backplaces is a digital collection of stories, poems and love letters about and from the backrooms of the internet where marginalised people find community. It's a tribute to the groups, forums, and connections that offered care, understanding, and connection to those who had no other place to turn.

The collection explores how anonymity nurtures vulnerability, how people abuse the frameworks of the web to build their own narratives and what kind of connection people who have been rejected in their physical bodies can find online. It's based on data from these communities, both my own and others'.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ 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?

part a :

technical infrastructure

[research]

I will do research as I develop on web collections and word-based web art as that is the form I've used so far to tell the stories on the collection.

[development]

I will keep playing and adding parts/rooms to the collection through coding.

part b:

storytelling

[writing]

At the same time I will do non-coding work by processing and writing the data I have and the data I gather so that it can be transformed into webpages.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ what is your timetable?

December / January Overall Infrastructure

• Research theoretical bases
• Keep making little tests and experiments
• Experiment with the stories and the platform
• Documentation of the process

February / March / April Technical Testing Fun Time

• Less theory research, mostly technical research
• Digital and physical prototypes of the collection components
• Testing and feedback
• More development of the platform and stories after testing

May / June Design and Production

• Finalise and tweak, fix mistakes
• Installation and presentation for the graduation show

⊹ ࣪ ˖ 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've contacted Kendal who was previously in XPUB, as her graduation project also explored online places. We are trying to find some sort of time for her to tell me how her project evolved to a phd project.

👐🏽 I will need quite a lot of help and support for the platform. Manetta and Joseph have supported me with this so far and I guess they'll continue to do so.

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

👐🏽 To prevent issue with me feeling insecure about my skills as a programmer I will keep showing my other xpubs what I'm doing and ask them to be nice and help if needed; especially if I start taking myself too seriously.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ 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.

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. It was part of a process of contextualising modern technology by learning what came before it and questioning why things are they way they are now.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ 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.

This project draws inspiration from a diverse body of research, reflecting the role of

(Adler & Adler, 2008).

It resonates with Gonzales's findings (2015) on how technology empowers disadvantaged minorities to expand their social networks, emphasizing the crucial role of community. Simultaneously, it aligns with The Government Lab's insights from 2020, which underscore the potency of virtual communities in nurturing mutual care, belonging, and shared experiences. Moreover, the project echoes Mesch's exploration (2011) of computer-mediated communication among marginalized groups, recognizing technology's role in providing a voice and fostering a sense of belonging. In addition, it takes cues from Mowat's work (2015) on the conceptualization of marginalization, championing inclusivity and acceptance. In essence, this project synthesizes these perspectives, emphasizing technology's symbiotic relationship with nature, the vital role of digital communities, and the primacy of mutual care, belonging, and relational healing in the digital realm.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ 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.

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.

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.