User:Marlon/projectproposal
Nov 27, 2013
Introduction
Sjabloon This graduation year I am looking into template culture, inspired by a Samsung smartphone commercial that promises its customers a chance to 'design their lives'. Mobile phones, apps and social networking sites are branded as services we can use to express ourselves online or to display our distinct personalities. But in reality, there is something quite depersonalizing about it: we are all taking the same type of pictures on the same type of phone and uploading them to the same website.
Not only do these devices and websites guarantee some kind of palette to 'paint your life' more beautiful, but extra features will help users manage every aspect of their busy lives. Not manage, compose! A semblance of control is promoted, not just related to lifestyle, but over the use of these applications as well. You decide the content, style and the presentation. But is this promise fulfilled or are they not just templates (or interfaces, filters) with minimal customization options? And do these templates, by giving users the option to customize and personalize, only generate a mass of homogenous content?
My fascination with the template has a lot to do with my background in Graphic Design. Part of my investigation will be the template as a very literal (media)object: as a web framework, the parameters of the interface a user encounters, the available fonts of a Tumblr layout or the filters of an Instagram account. But the topic is just as interesting when the template signifies the joined effort of all these applications to generate a predictable avatar version of ourselves. The Dutch word for template is 'sjabloon', its original meaning is 'modelvorm': a mold that, for example, is used to draw the same shape over and over again. In a more abstract sense, the word can be applied to anything that is repetitive, often imitated or conventional. Here the topic takes a more anthropological turn: the users of these templates and the content they generate while applying them.
There are two parts to this investigation: 'how it looks' and 'how it is used': the surface level aesthetics of a medium combined with how it forms and shapes its users. I am curious about user-generated content (or artwork) that is created within the limitations of these applications or that manages to break them. For some, a template and its restrictions can be quite freeing.
Outcome I will approach this subject as a graphic designer, templates/standards and their restrictions/limitations are very familiar to me. They're often an essential part of the work. My goal is to extract and expose the underlying principles of a template. Using my preferred way of working: recontextualising, repurposing or reusing the visual language of digital culture. Revealing the framework of a template or its byproducts and creating a sort of catalogue – a collection of sjablonen found online. The design will most likely have a physical outcome, a printed form. A series of posters, a book.
Relation to previous practice
Research trajectory During the last two years of my bachelor, a fascination with the viral workings of the World Wide Web led to a number of projects. I focused on the process of finding information, especially in the case of current news events. Via image search engines or social networking sites I collected comments or images related to a topic and then attempted to recreate these stories or reinterpret the information. Some examples:
Tsunami by proxy (2011)
This graduation piece is a collection of around 1200 postcards, printed with popular images found online that depict the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. (Natural) disasters are visual stories and the images that most accurately capture the imagination of the viewer are very popular online, even if they are stills from movies or images from other disasters.
PSYOP (2010)
PSYOP is a collection of forum posts 'published' as a poetry book. The posts are comments on the 'Balloon boy hoax' of October 2009, as I was struck by how much meaningless content was produced by the online spectators of the story. The story went viral, picked up by the traditional media and more people rushed to their computer to share their advice, opinions, links and hastily generated gifs. The book is a chronological narration of the hoax, interspersed with quotes and screen captures from news broadcasting (a lot of the same messages and images repeated - a logical effect of 24/7 news coverage).
At PZI, my research stepped a bit away from the news items. And I became more interested in sharing, peer-to-peer networks and how these notions are made visual. During the second trimester this resulted into an investigation that can be divided into three sections:
Pirate Bay Archive
Karel Bilek created an archive of the Pirate Bay, a website that indexes (illegal) content available for download. The archive, an 75MB .XML file (a format used to store data), contains over 1,6 million links to torrent files. That would make it possible to recreate The Pirate Bay if it would ever be taken offline. As a very simple exercise I randomly displayed one item of the list on a website, with a link to the download. This gives users access to an enormous amount of content, but without the 'search option' it loses almost all its functionality.
.NFO-files
.NFO files are a prominent tradition within the file sharing subculture. In the past the limited technical possibilities set boundaries for how the file looked and although the software used to create these files has developed significantly, the overall look of an .NFO file has remained the same, all due to its nostalgic value. I am impressed with how the creators of these files manage to construct something great with very little: a limited toolbox of white on black or black on white symbols is used to make impressive pieces of work. The files have changed from a necessity to a form of expression. It is the "corporate identity" of individuals or groups of people that manifest themselves online.
Peer-to-peer-to-Peer-to-peer
A collage of images, downloaded via Google Images and printed on seperate pages, that symbolize peer-to-peer networks. The printed pages overlap, connecting the peers of one diagram to those of another, forming a larger network of peer-to-peer networks.
Peers can form a network of nodes in which they share data peer-to-peer, without any central coordination. Currently the term "peer-to-peer" is at the height of its popularity, something you see reflected in the striking amount of images visualising the system that circulate the Web. Though the system stays the same, its use is in constant development. This "evolution" can be observed when looking at these images: the older images are smaller in file-size, with low-tech graphics depicting desktop computers, while the newer versions illustrate the increasing social impact of the peer-to-peer system.
Practical steps
1. Start by making (very) small projects, to avoid getting stuck in thinking, reading and conceptualizing. They will focus on either analyzing each aspect of a template, without the actual content. Or explore this interplay between the template and the users input. What happens to content when the template changes or what kind of content will have an effect on the template.
More specifically, some 'research questions' could be: What does an Instagram filter look like by itself? Or is the most important part of an Instagram filter the type of picture that gets filtered? What are the visual aspects of an interface? How are mobile phone apps branded and advertised?
2. These projects will be collected and documented in a work log.
3. Of these small projects I will hopefully be able to select one or two or three that will lead to further investigation and turned into a bigger, conceptually stronger project.