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=Project Proposal Drat=
=Project Proposal Draft=


==Description of my works in the past year==
==Tentative title==  
'''RE:'''


To begin with I started by writing 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 similarly to performative speech-acts, but with a more direct and material effect.


==Short Description==


Simultaneously I developed and online map of the streets of Rotterdam. This map - a striped-down version of the map of Rotterdam - displaying 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.
For many of us our relation with spam emails consists in moving them from the inbox to the junk-mail folder of our email accounts. Yet, if we take a close look at some of the unsolicited emails we receive we might find them curious, and may even be amuse by them. We might even begin to see them as a literary creation, in which considerable amounts of inventiveness, and awareness to the current global situation, as well as knowledge about society's soft-spots are explored in order to produce a persuasive message. Besides, curious glitches abound such as the heavy use of stereotypes, Google-translate misinterpretations, typos, word obfuscations, and recurring text fragments. Being it such an idiosyncratic and rich area of text production I believe it deserves to be embraced as a literary genre. Being it so, I am interested in exploring it as a literary device, as a template for writing and communication.
[[File:Name-map-02.png|thumb|right]]
 
 
==Methodology==
 
As already mentioned, for various and legitimate reasons, we don't pay much attention to spam email messages. Would we then start to read and respond to them, if rather than trying to persuades us to join some money winning (or loosing) scheme, spam emails would try to seduce us to take part in a shared writing process with someone distant and unknown?
 
I would like to provide a positive answer to this question. My strategy for attempting to do so will be based upon the appropriation of spam as a literary device. In order to do it, I conceived a system summed up in the following diagram.
 
[[File:Diagram-Pingme.png|left]]
 
'''1)''' To initiate the process I will take on the role of a spammer, who sends unsolicited emails (to be more precise, just one email) to a large number of addresses of unknown individuals. This first email will take on the same structure as most spam messages, comprising exposition of the great opportunity one has just been given, followed by the argumentation to why one should take part in it.  
 
'''2)''' If a receiver answers, her message will be replied from my side through a bot, who will analyze the received message at different levels (e.g. letter occurrence, word occurrence, keywords, and phrases) and produce a reply that will try to respond to it, but also push it into other directions, as my aim is to tell and be told short stories through these these text exchanges.
 
The email exchange between bot and human receiver will go on for a few times, after which it will be interrupted and followed by stage 3. 
 
'''3)''' At this point the bot will step back from its reader-writer function, and become a proxy, that will forward the messages between two human receivers, who happen be in a similar stage of writing process.
 
The two, now connected, human receivers won't be notified of this change. It will be up to them how to continue the dialogue and discover the one at the other end.
 
The bot will server as an agent who mediates connections between humans, both between me and the receivers, and between two receivers. 
 
 
Note: This is one possible way of integrating the referred elements, and I want to try it fully, so that I can see what results it produces. However it doesn't have to be the definitive way of doing it. Perhaps at later stage I will rearrange the same elements differently, and bring in new elements and methods.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
===Outcome===
 
As a first raw outcome I want to store all the communication history between myself (the bot) and the receivers; if possible I would also like to keep track of the receiver to receiver exchange. Yet, at this moment I cannot decide upon a final outcome for the project. Some possibilities are a radio-play, a book, or a map of these exchanges (taking time as one of its dimensions).
 
 
 
 
 
 
===A first test email===
As a first test I decided to email some random addresses from my address-book and see if any replies would ping back. Here is the email sent and its replies:
 
<source lang="email">
From: . <.@gmail.com>
It looks like you're writing a letter.
I hope I am not making a mistake, but I think it would be a nice
experience to writing with you.
 
I must say my writing is all over the place, I can't just stand still.
You know that feeling?
verrrrr veeeerrr verrrr bossss verbose!
and sttutt ttt t eeeringgg stuttering on words??
 
........................................
........................................
...........................................
....................a....................
............a................a...........
........a.a...........a..............a....
.a................a............a........
 
 
OH! Probably I have just now manage to confuse you big time
Confusion can be a natural state /kənˈfjuːʒən/ as well as passivity
/pæsɪv/ and also procrastination /pɹəʊ̆ˌkɹæstɪˈneɪʃə̆n/
 
 
Write me some lines, I can only promise it doesn't get any better than this.
</source>
 
And these are the received replies
 
<source lang="email">
From: Konsul Gnadenwalze
 
01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01110010 01100101
01100001 01110100 00101100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101
00100000 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00101110
00100000 00101101 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101011
01101111 01101110 01110011 01110101 01101100
 
--
 
    From: . <.@gmail.com>
 
    295424 294913 295424 294913 32768 294985 299016 294977 294913 299072
    33344  32768  295489 295497 299016 294977 32768 299008 295488 294977
    294913 299017 294977 33352 32768 33345 32768 294976 294977 299016 32768
    295433 295497 295496 299017 299073 295488
 
--
 
        From: Konsul Gnadenwalze <gnadenwalze@gmail.com>
 
        %68%74%74%70%3a%2f%2f%69%6d%67%75%72%2e%63%6f%6d%2f%34%39%53%67%68


What seemed to create here was an interface to access 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 ask for information on streets that I wouldn't be normally interested in knowing about. It opened up the possibility for a serendipitous navigation through the city name's history (archive).


----


The same serendiptous exploration made its way to the next project, the next work - Radio Liberté Egalité Beyoncé. RLEB was an online radio-station with a schedule composed of 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 within 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.
From: Danny van der Kleij
[[File:Radio_LEB.png|thumb|right]]


I just find it very strange that gmail marked it as "important because
of people in the email converstation" while I have never been emailed
by you before, which means you could use gmails "important" tag to
figure out who is in the bcc


The essay written alongside the RLEB began by tracing the archive's historical ties to power, functioning as a legitimator of power and knowledge. It also remarked on the ideology which underlies any archive, even folkloric archive such as Youtube. The ideology, can be best perceived through what is kept from entering the archive. However, in the essay I mention two important differences between a physical offline archive and a digital online one: the latter has the potential of a wider access, and also has the potential to let its item been taken by visitors, without impoverishing it. These difference result in an invitation for the individuals' appropriation and transformation of the archived material. When one of its items is taken and transformed, a new version of it appears, and a certain confusion emerges over its origin - which one is the original and which is fictitious? When remixed versions surface, they change the archive into a space of dialogue, and  emergence of discourses, rather than a site aimed at legitimizing power and knowledge. The essay goes on mentioning artistic projects that try to address and remix large chunks of online archives, which only can be accomplished by the intervention of computer code. Curiously in these cases code is  put to perform in order to bring a more humane sensibility (or intelligibility) to the archive. But that also demonstrates that code can perform quite beyond the reach of a single human.
----


From: Catarina Oliveira


Data Factory looked at direct marking companies' acquisition of consumers data, with the aim to target individual consumers with products which they might be more inclined to buy. It consisted of a small archive of recordings from phone-calls made to such companies in which I tried to sell them the of their business main ingredient - consumer data - being the consumer here only myself. Through the reactions to this simple short-circuit the ideology behind such business model became more apparent. The calls were gathered together in a website, with a certain corporate style, in which they could be listened to them, joined by pictures illustrating or ridiculing what was being said.
??????????????????????????????????
[[File:DataFactory-04.png|thumb|right]]




In the essay The Work of Audiences revolved around Dallas Smythe's concept of the work of audiences. In his view audiences have the job of creating demand for advertised goods. What advertisers buy when placing a advert on a magazine, TV-show of website is the audiences' attention and capacity to buy what is being advertised. It happens that this work-force is further explored in web 2.0, where it not only create demand for the advertised products, but also work on producing many of the contents that make up the web. Following that line of thought I asked whether there was a difference from the work of audiences on platform like Youtube and ones like Wikipedia. The answer to this question was that difference lies in the fact that a project like Wikipedia (apart from being non-profit), allows audiences to engage with it in more through way, having to understand how the platform works and discuss its policies and structure. It is still work, but more conscious and engaged one, and which becomes a common resource.
----


From: Alisa Heller


==General Methodology of Work==
Haha? What s this?


The methodology I have employed in the constructions of my works generally begins by encountering a problem or frustration. I come across something in which I see a great potential, but due to some blockage, its potential is underexplored. As an example, I found a great wealth of audio material available at Internet Archive, however its interface tended (and still tends) to conceal most this material. This frustration led me to ask how could the diversity and quantity of material become more apparent and accessible.
</source>




A stage of experimentation and research generally follows. At this point I try to broaden my question, find possible angles to approach it, find other approaches to similar problems, in short contextualize it. Also important component of this stage is loose experimentation, not concerning myself too much with the outcome, and regarding this point an an exploratory and testing ground. Returning to the IA sound library example, I went on looking at other online audio archives, focusing on their access interfaces, I explored IA in depth, and tested strategies for accessing large quantities of audio material.
===Other prototypes===
From the loose exploration or, to use another term, tinkering, a more precise idea of the materials, and the system I am engaging with is formed. Tinkering also allows the approach which will be undertaken to surface organically, almost by itself, out of this stage. It can be seen as process of exclusion and adaptation of ideas, through doing. By the end of this stage an approach is decided upon.
In order to engage with email spam I have made few prototypes, so that I'd gain more insight into it.
They consisted in:
* '''Archive of Spam email''' - [[soon to be put online]]


* '''Email exchanges with Mr. Wang, a banker in China who asked for my help in order to release a large sum of money frozen in his bank'''


The following stage is one of concretization of the elected approach, bringing it from its experimental stage, through various prototypes to its presentable shape. It is at this point when most decisions are made, such as what to include or exclude, in what context should the project exist, how it will function, what will be its appearance. In the example I have been giving, I decided for an online radio, exclusively based on audio material from IA, that would group the sound materials under given programs with specific genres, it could be listened through a website consisting of an image of a radio.   




The resulting object is rarely, if it has ever been, a solution for the problem which initiates the whole process. Rather that providing an answer it be an imaginative solution that ought pose more questions, and show the problem under another, perhaps unexpected perspective. Hopefully such approach will challenge the value of the system/object in question, and allow it reveal itself to us in another form.
==General Work Methodology==


==Summary of interests and processes==
The methodology I have employed in the constructions of my works generally begins by encountering a problem or frustration. I come across something in which I see potential, but due to some blockage, it is under-explored. As an example, I found a great wealth of audio material available at Internet Archive, however its interface tended to conceal most of the material. This frustration led me to ask how could the diversity and quantity of material become more apparent and accessible.


===Keywords===


Archive, access, appropriation, humor, unexpected, experimentation, questioning, marginal.
A stage of experimentation and research generally follows. At this point I try to broaden my question, find possible angles to approach it, find other approaches to similar problems, engage with my subject and experiment. The engagement with the subject seems crucial, it is a step towards the object of research, into trying to look at it closely, and to establish a dialog with it. This happen more clearly in Data Factory where I tried to convince direct-marking companies' employees into talking with me and answer my questions about direct-marking and users' privacy.


The following stage is one of concretization of the elected approach, bringing it from its experimental stage, through various prototypes to its final from. It is at this point when most decisions are made, such as what to include, in what context should it exist, how it will function, and what will be its material presence. 


====archive====
The archive has been an entity that I have recurrently explored in my work and that I still feel drawn to explore. My work has taken two angles on it. One where an existing archive is appropriated and explored, such as on Radio Liberté Egalité Beyoncé, where the archive's (sound)items were placed in a different context, in this case a mockup radio station. This approach attempted to serendipitously navigate the archive, in search of unexpected items, that laid beneath the surface. The second approach has focused on the creating small personal archives. As an example Data Factory, assembled a series of phone calls I did to direct marketing company; or Radio Fragments, where the silence of a radio emission are continuously stored, and with those archived items a composition is constructed. Currently I proposing to work with small book archives, personal digital libraries which brings me to term "access".


The resulting object is rarely, a solution for the problem which initiated the work process. Rather than providing an answer it will be an imaginative solution that ought pose more questions, show the problem under another, perhaps unexpected, perspective. Hopefully such approach will challenge the value of the object in question, and allow it to reveal itself under another form.


====access====
Access was a driving force of Radio LEB, to access to what lays beneath the visible surface of the archive. Now I find myself frustrated with electronic books, as there are plenty of them out there, but not accessible. This barrier is both present at 'institutional' level, with Google Books storing a vast quantity of book but not permitting access to them, but also on smaller scale, at which level, due to current technical ripeness, I am not able to share my electronic bookshelf (and access others') as widely as I wished. In either cases access is limited by others or by the lack of infrastructure.


====experimentation & humor====
I do not expect to find a remedy for the problems and frustrations, however I can experiment with 'imaginary' solutions to the problem, which rather than answering pose questions. This was the approach undertaken in Data Factory, where instead of taking a militant approach against direct marketing and internet spam, I decide to take part in the game, and tried selling my consumer information, so I could be spammed more effectively.


====appropriation and re-contextualization====
The appropriation of material, placing it under other contexts was already touched briefly when describing Radio LEB. What happens when an object is put in different context? Does it transform itself? Does it transform its provenance? I believe so, and in that transformation, as in the one that happens when an object is manipulated, and the two (original and transformed) similarly believable objects a put face-to-face, copy and original are indistinguishable. Here a process questioning process seems to begin which interrogates  the authority and the original.


==Description of my previous works in the past year==


====marginal====
To begin with I started by [http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/User:Andre_Castro/WritingResearch/essay01 writing on the performativity of code]. Departing from Katherine Hayle's notion of code performativity I went on looking at how does code perform. How does code, rather than being a descriptive tool, has the capacity to act, to change things in the real world, similarly to a performative speech-act, such as a judge stating: "I pronounce you guilty of the crime", and often with more direct and material effects.  
I see the process of re-contextualization and manipulation happening in my working, mainly in reference to entities that are marginal, or in other words that exists outside our attention focus. By presenting them under a unusual setting their value shifts. We begin looking with a different eyes. Such was the case of Radio LEB where I tried bring forth as much "invisible" material as possible.




Simultaneously I developed and [http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/~acastro/map/ online map of the streets of Rotterdam]. This map - a striped-down version of the original map of Rotterdam - only displayed 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 seemed to be creating here was an interface to access city's archive through a different channel. By having the indexes of the archive - the street names - displayed on the screen I might see and ask for information on streets that I wouldn't normally be interested in. It opened up the possibility for a serendipitous navigation through the city history.


===references===
[[File:Name-map-02.png|thumb|right]]


==Ludovico, Alessandro. "Post-Digital Print. The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894"==


Post-Digital Print maps the transformations and cross contamination in happening currently print, both in its physical and digital form. Ludivico does so by analyzing the historical context within which these exchanges are happening, the technology behind those changes, and experiments and visionary artworks which are themselves promoters of transformation.
The same serendipitous exploration made its way to the next project, [Radio Liberté Egalité Beyoncé (RLEB)]. RLEB was an online radio-station with a schedule composed of 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 the archive, within 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.
[[File:Radio_LEB.png|thumb|right]]




==McLuhan, Marshall. "The Medium is the Message"==
[http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/User:Andre_Castro/research/1.2/essay-archive The essay] written alongside the RLEB began by tracing the archive's historical ties to power, functioning as a legitimator of power and knowledge. It mentioned the ideology which underlies any archive, even folkloric archive such as Youtube, an which can be best perceived through what is kept from entering the archive. Never-the-less important differences exist between a physical offline archive and a digital online one: the latter has the potential of a wider access, and also to let its item be taken by visitors, without the risk of impoverishment. These differences result in an invitation for appropriation of the digital archive. When one of its items is taken and transformed, a new version of it appears, and a certain confusion emerges over its origin - which one is the original and which is fictitious? When remixed versions surface, they change the archive into a space of dialogue and  emergence of discourses, rather than a site for safekeeping and knowledge legitimization.


Analysis media the changes media bring to the world, and how they change the world. 'For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs'(p. 8).


My interest in McLuhan goes towards the references made to media misreadings and attachment to the past, which follows their invention.
[http://andrecastro.info/data-factory/ Data Factory] looked at direct marking companies' acquisition of consumers data. It consisted of a small archive of recordings of phone-calls made to such companies. During the calls I tried to sell them their business's main ingredient - consumer data - with the catch being that "consumer" in this context meant only myself. Through the reactions to this simple short-circuit the ideology behind such business model became more apparent. The calls were gathered on a website, with a certain corporate style, in which they could be listened to, in parallel with images illustrating or ridiculing what was being said.
[[File:DataFactory-04.png|thumb|right]]


At such early stage several possible venues are open for a medium to endeavor, only latter on settling on a specific one. Examples of these misreadings are the telegraph lines being used to play chess and lottery, or radio being only explored by "hams" and only later commercial investment became aware of its potential(p.272); Or Thomas Edison disregarding the role of the gramophone in entertainment, and only considering it suitable for business(p.302). In relation to its past McLuhan refers the fact that more than 50 per cent of books printed until 1700 were medieval or ancient texts(p.186); and how owners of the first printed books would take them to a scribe in order to have them hand copied and illustrated (p.189).
And such attachment to the past in the recent medium of digital print, which seem to follow the McLuhan's observation: 'A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor it does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions to them(p.189)


These two aspects of a new media are currently visible in the world of electronic books, the most popular books e digital formats are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' and the ''Grimm Tales'' and their appearance is still very attached to paper books. There isn't any visible innovation in content or form, although a new technology is available, but which more eager to restrict experimentation.
[http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/Andre_Castro/research/1.3/review_1 The essay The Work of Audiences] departed from Dallas Smythe's text ''On the Audience Commodity and its Work''. In Smythe's view, the audience job consists in creating demand for advertised goods. What advertisers buy when placing an advert on a magazine, TV-show of website is the audiences' attention and their capacity to buy what is being advertised. It happens that the labor of this immaterial work-force changed under the Web 2.0, as noted by Andrejevic. Audiences are no longer simply asked to generate demand for advertised goods, but also to put their creativity to work in producing many of the contents that surround those adverts. By doing so audiences also develop a community around their creations, and produce information about their behavior, which will be used in targeted advertisement directed at them. In exchange audiences receive a small amount of control over their creations, which are ultimately property of the company hosting them. Following this line of thought I asked whether there was a difference from the work of audiences on platform like Youtube to one like Wikipedia. The situation seems to be that although Wikipedia relies on audiences' free creative labor, they are given more control over their creations, and engage in discussions over the functioning of Wikipedia. Is this difference enough for the work of audiences to be classified as less exploitative than the one done for Youtube?

Latest revision as of 16:30, 6 December 2012

Project Proposal Draft

Tentative title

RE:


Short Description

For many of us our relation with spam emails consists in moving them from the inbox to the junk-mail folder of our email accounts. Yet, if we take a close look at some of the unsolicited emails we receive we might find them curious, and may even be amuse by them. We might even begin to see them as a literary creation, in which considerable amounts of inventiveness, and awareness to the current global situation, as well as knowledge about society's soft-spots are explored in order to produce a persuasive message. Besides, curious glitches abound such as the heavy use of stereotypes, Google-translate misinterpretations, typos, word obfuscations, and recurring text fragments. Being it such an idiosyncratic and rich area of text production I believe it deserves to be embraced as a literary genre. Being it so, I am interested in exploring it as a literary device, as a template for writing and communication.


Methodology

As already mentioned, for various and legitimate reasons, we don't pay much attention to spam email messages. Would we then start to read and respond to them, if rather than trying to persuades us to join some money winning (or loosing) scheme, spam emails would try to seduce us to take part in a shared writing process with someone distant and unknown?

I would like to provide a positive answer to this question. My strategy for attempting to do so will be based upon the appropriation of spam as a literary device. In order to do it, I conceived a system summed up in the following diagram.

Diagram-Pingme.png

1) To initiate the process I will take on the role of a spammer, who sends unsolicited emails (to be more precise, just one email) to a large number of addresses of unknown individuals. This first email will take on the same structure as most spam messages, comprising exposition of the great opportunity one has just been given, followed by the argumentation to why one should take part in it.

2) If a receiver answers, her message will be replied from my side through a bot, who will analyze the received message at different levels (e.g. letter occurrence, word occurrence, keywords, and phrases) and produce a reply that will try to respond to it, but also push it into other directions, as my aim is to tell and be told short stories through these these text exchanges.

The email exchange between bot and human receiver will go on for a few times, after which it will be interrupted and followed by stage 3.

3) At this point the bot will step back from its reader-writer function, and become a proxy, that will forward the messages between two human receivers, who happen be in a similar stage of writing process.

The two, now connected, human receivers won't be notified of this change. It will be up to them how to continue the dialogue and discover the one at the other end.

The bot will server as an agent who mediates connections between humans, both between me and the receivers, and between two receivers.


Note: This is one possible way of integrating the referred elements, and I want to try it fully, so that I can see what results it produces. However it doesn't have to be the definitive way of doing it. Perhaps at later stage I will rearrange the same elements differently, and bring in new elements and methods.







Outcome

As a first raw outcome I want to store all the communication history between myself (the bot) and the receivers; if possible I would also like to keep track of the receiver to receiver exchange. Yet, at this moment I cannot decide upon a final outcome for the project. Some possibilities are a radio-play, a book, or a map of these exchanges (taking time as one of its dimensions).




A first test email

As a first test I decided to email some random addresses from my address-book and see if any replies would ping back. Here is the email sent and its replies: 

From: . <.@gmail.com>
It looks like you're writing a letter.
I hope I am not making a mistake, but I think it would be a nice
experience to writing with you.

I must say my writing is all over the place, I can't just stand still.
You know that feeling?
verrrrr veeeerrr verrrr bossss verbose!
and sttutt ttt t eeeringgg stuttering on words??

........................................
........................................
...........................................
....................a....................
............a................a...........
........a.a...........a..............a....
.a................a............a........


OH! Probably I have just now manage to confuse you big time
Confusion can be a natural state /kənˈfjuːʒən/ as well as passivity
/pæsɪv/ and also procrastination /pɹəʊ̆ˌkɹæstɪˈneɪʃə̆n/


Write me some lines, I can only promise it doesn't get any better than this.

And these are the received replies 

From: Konsul Gnadenwalze 

01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01110010 01100101
01100001 01110100 00101100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101
00100000 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00101110
00100000 00101101 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101011
01101111 01101110 01110011 01110101 01101100

--

    From: . <.@gmail.com>

    295424 294913 295424 294913 32768 294985 299016 294977 294913 299072 
    33344  32768  295489 295497 299016 294977 32768 299008 295488 294977 
    294913 299017 294977 33352 32768 33345 32768 294976 294977 299016 32768 
    295433 295497 295496 299017 299073 295488

--

        From: Konsul Gnadenwalze <gnadenwalze@gmail.com>

        %68%74%74%70%3a%2f%2f%69%6d%67%75%72%2e%63%6f%6d%2f%34%39%53%67%68


----

From: Danny van der Kleij

I just find it very strange that gmail marked it as "important because
of people in the email converstation" while I have never been emailed
by you before, which means you could use gmails "important" tag to
figure out who is in the bcc

----

From: Catarina Oliveira 

??????????????????????????????????


----

From: Alisa Heller

Haha? What s this?


Other prototypes

In order to engage with email spam I have made few prototypes, so that I'd gain more insight into it. They consisted in:

  • Email exchanges with Mr. Wang, a banker in China who asked for my help in order to release a large sum of money frozen in his bank


General Work Methodology

The methodology I have employed in the constructions of my works generally begins by encountering a problem or frustration. I come across something in which I see potential, but due to some blockage, it is under-explored. As an example, I found a great wealth of audio material available at Internet Archive, however its interface tended to conceal most of the material. This frustration led me to ask how could the diversity and quantity of material become more apparent and accessible.


A stage of experimentation and research generally follows. At this point I try to broaden my question, find possible angles to approach it, find other approaches to similar problems, engage with my subject and experiment. The engagement with the subject seems crucial, it is a step towards the object of research, into trying to look at it closely, and to establish a dialog with it. This happen more clearly in Data Factory where I tried to convince direct-marking companies' employees into talking with me and answer my questions about direct-marking and users' privacy.

The following stage is one of concretization of the elected approach, bringing it from its experimental stage, through various prototypes to its final from. It is at this point when most decisions are made, such as what to include, in what context should it exist, how it will function, and what will be its material presence.


The resulting object is rarely, a solution for the problem which initiated the work process. Rather than providing an answer it will be an imaginative solution that ought pose more questions, show the problem under another, perhaps unexpected, perspective. Hopefully such approach will challenge the value of the object in question, and allow it to reveal itself under another form.



Description of my previous works in the past year

To begin with I started by writing on the performativity of code. Departing from Katherine Hayle's notion of code performativity I went on looking at how does code perform. How does code, rather than being a descriptive tool, has the capacity to act, to change things in the real world, similarly to a performative speech-act, such as a judge stating: "I pronounce you guilty of the crime", and often with more direct and material effects.


Simultaneously I developed and online map of the streets of Rotterdam. This map - a striped-down version of the original map of Rotterdam - only displayed 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 seemed to be creating here was an interface to access city's archive through a different channel. By having the indexes of the archive - the street names - displayed on the screen I might see and ask for information on streets that I wouldn't normally be interested in. It opened up the possibility for a serendipitous navigation through the city history.

Name-map-02.png


The same serendipitous exploration made its way to the next project, [Radio Liberté Egalité Beyoncé (RLEB)]. RLEB was an online radio-station with a schedule composed of 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 the archive, within 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.

Radio LEB.png


The essay written alongside the RLEB began by tracing the archive's historical ties to power, functioning as a legitimator of power and knowledge. It mentioned the ideology which underlies any archive, even folkloric archive such as Youtube, an which can be best perceived through what is kept from entering the archive. Never-the-less important differences exist between a physical offline archive and a digital online one: the latter has the potential of a wider access, and also to let its item be taken by visitors, without the risk of impoverishment. These differences result in an invitation for appropriation of the digital archive. When one of its items is taken and transformed, a new version of it appears, and a certain confusion emerges over its origin - which one is the original and which is fictitious? When remixed versions surface, they change the archive into a space of dialogue and emergence of discourses, rather than a site for safekeeping and knowledge legitimization.


Data Factory looked at direct marking companies' acquisition of consumers data. It consisted of a small archive of recordings of phone-calls made to such companies. During the calls I tried to sell them their business's main ingredient - consumer data - with the catch being that "consumer" in this context meant only myself. Through the reactions to this simple short-circuit the ideology behind such business model became more apparent. The calls were gathered on a website, with a certain corporate style, in which they could be listened to, in parallel with images illustrating or ridiculing what was being said.

DataFactory-04.png


The essay The Work of Audiences departed from Dallas Smythe's text On the Audience Commodity and its Work. In Smythe's view, the audience job consists in creating demand for advertised goods. What advertisers buy when placing an advert on a magazine, TV-show of website is the audiences' attention and their capacity to buy what is being advertised. It happens that the labor of this immaterial work-force changed under the Web 2.0, as noted by Andrejevic. Audiences are no longer simply asked to generate demand for advertised goods, but also to put their creativity to work in producing many of the contents that surround those adverts. By doing so audiences also develop a community around their creations, and produce information about their behavior, which will be used in targeted advertisement directed at them. In exchange audiences receive a small amount of control over their creations, which are ultimately property of the company hosting them. Following this line of thought I asked whether there was a difference from the work of audiences on platform like Youtube to one like Wikipedia. The situation seems to be that although Wikipedia relies on audiences' free creative labor, they are given more control over their creations, and engage in discussions over the functioning of Wikipedia. Is this difference enough for the work of audiences to be classified as less exploitative than the one done for Youtube?

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