User:Ada/Projectproposal

// home

-talk about which communities

-why are they hidden, why this matters to me

⊹ ࣪ ˖ 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 can foster vulnerability online, how people abuse the frameworks of the web to build their own narratives and the kind of connections people who have been rejected in their physical bodies can find on the internet. 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 and hard to find, requiring reall (-finish)

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.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ 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]

Backplaces is structured pretty simply as a digital village accessible through the main homepage. From there there will be little house illustrations that are hyperlinks to other html pages composing the collection.

part b: storytelling

[writing]

At the same time I will do non-coding work by processing and writing the data I have. This consists of the answers from two survey I ran on reddit, a very long collection of messages and comments from these backrooms and an interview with a digital literature club. Before these things become webpages they will be processed and made into their own little projects.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ what is your timetable?

December / January Overall Infrastructure

• Research theoretical bases
• Keep making tests and experiments of the separate webpages
• Finalise the architecture of the project, test and decide which path to the collection is most clear
• Experiment with writing and rewriting the stories both through coding and just writing

February / March / April Technical Testing Fun Time

• Less theory research, mostly technical research on these projects and how they run and are programmed
• Make even more digital and physical prototypes of the collection components themselves
• Continuously test and gather feedback on the collection from my classmates, teachers and friends
• More development of the platform and the stories based on the feedback from the tests

May / June Design and Production

• Finalise and tweak, fix mistakes and make new ones
• Install and prepare 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. These people will be kept fully anonymous and if any detail about them is shared it will be altered to protect their identity.

👐🏽 I've contacted Kendal a previous XPUB student, 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 would really love to find someone who has experience with building this kind of platform and ask them practical questions.

👐🏽 To prevent issues 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

This project draws inspiration from a diverse body of research, reflecting the fundamental role of the internet in the lives of marginalised people (Gonzales, 2015; Mesch, 2011). It uses conceptions and past studies on people who sat outside the norm in their communities and formed digressive digital communities (Adler & Adler, 2008; Smith & Wickes, 2013). In finding the stories and the people I used conceptions of virtual communities from The Government Lab (2020) which underline the power of virtual communities in nurturing mutual care, belonging, and shared experiences. To identify whether the people I was talking to/about were marginalised I used Mowat's conceptualisation of marginalisation (2015), emphasising inclusivity and acceptance.

For the technical background my work borrows from the way Tiny Awards celebrates a small, playful and heartfelt web. I was also inspired by the html review, an annual literature journal made to exist on the web. I also take more and more from the Net Art Anthology made by Rhizome, a collection of digital art.

In general, Backplaces 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 meets other projects on that plane of hidden 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.

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.