User:Marlon/selfdirectedtext

Self Directed Research Essay

first draft

Describe recent work

(see also: project descriptions)

Methodology: In quite a few of my works of the past few years, I've followed a certain method. Starting out with an event or story that has taken my interest, like a natural disaster, a meme or a fake news item. Then I start searching the internet for images or comments or typical graphic elements and I collect these. The Internet is constantly repeating the same information, in text or in image. I prefer a graphical output, but I try to find a form that fits the subject. It could be (tourist) postcards, because they refer to a specific part of the world. Or I choose a form that puts the subject in a different context. But even though I am a graphic designer, I don't want the outcome to be too clear. Not interfere with the content too much. Setting some rules or boundaries helps. This creates surprises when collecting material, when printing or when putting the final work together. The final result is almost always a surprise.

Descriptions:

• PSYOP: collection of online comments made during the Colorado balloon boy hoax (on Youtube, message boards, news sites). Bundled together with stills from news channels in a poetry book. Each chapter named after
• Tsunami by proxy: collection of "famous" pictures taken during tsunami in Japan in 2011, printed on postcards. Laid out chronologically.
• Thesis: printed with a Matrix-printer, as a sort of offline hypertext. The end result depended for the most part on how the printer would handle the source material. The hyperlinks added to the text allow the reader to choose his or her own path through the material. As a result, the medium becomes as important as the message itself.

P2P:

There are quite a lot of images that illustrate a peer-to-peer network on the internet. Using a script, Google.com and the search queries "p2p", "peer to peer" and "peer2peer", I downloaded a small collection of these images. The images are quite similar: diagrams that display computers (peers!) connected with lines or arrows, often positioned in a square or a circle (the network!). You can easily tell when these images were created. They go from simple, black and white diagrams to shiny and colorful Web 2.0 graphics. The old ones feature more desktops than laptops.

The images are bitmapped and then printed separately on A4-size paper. The older images don't change much, but the process alters the newer diagrams quite a lot. As a final work, the pieces of paper (and the diagrams printed on them) are stuck to a wall, while the diagrams printed on them are connected, forming a large network of peer-to-peer networks.

Identify key themes

(see also: poster)

graphic output, new media, internet (and its viral workings), (hyper)reality, the meme, a search, a story, repetition, patterns, copies, boundaries.

from annotations:

Cyburbia (James Harkin)

Chapter: Peer Pressure

James Harkin's Cyburbia links internet to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. It discusses our present internet culture and how it has transformed the way we live. The chapter Peer Pressure focuses on the effect of our peers in the second coming of the internet. Norbert Wiener envisioned cybernetics a society where we are human nodes firing off messages and adjusting ourselves to feedback in an information loop that never ends.

The internet began as a small collection of static websites, but around the millennium it grew to a web of sites populated by ordinary users. Decentralised file-sharing sites became increasingly popular: peer-to-peer communication without authority. After that came Google, eBay, blogs and finally, social networking sites. Harkin sees this mass migration to social networking communities like Facebook as a social movement. Users sign up to have unmediated, authentic experiences with their online peers, without any need for a government or control.

Cybernetics are evident in the workings of Facebook, as human nodes we are the infrastructure of the social network and our friendships make the connections. Network theorists were right all along, the relationships between people are just as important as those people themselves. The effects of sharing information peer-to-peer are not necessarily positive, it's power can be used to virally spread falsehoods online. Internet users want to communicate with equals and to have control over what they watch, read and listen to. They spend their free time observing others and exhibiting themselves. Though not always a good thing, it is easy to find like minded people online. But we are still experiencing information through an electronic medium.

Wild Images (Jorinde Seijdel)

Susan Sontag, quoted in the text, noticed a shift. A picture is no longer a keep safe, but has evolved into something that "disseminates and circulates". Banning these wild images is so difficult, because they could be made by literally anyone: the boundaries and rules of the professional news media are not set for the amateur photographer. This results in images being circulated in a very liberating and democratic way, but they're also more explicit, savage and perverse. Especially in the case of accidents, disasters and wars we've become a society that wants to "consume events" from everywhere, while they're happening. We're a very professional public: less a participant, more a recorder or a performer. We're either taking pictures or being photographed. We record events, but we also re-enact them, to the point where we, maybe not on purpose, are imitating images or at least always aware of the possibility of our actions being broadcasted.

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination (Jos de Mul)

Benjamin wrote about mechanical reproduction, de Mul writes about Digital Recombination: the 'combining, decombining and recombining' of pieces of data in a database. Not only the database as part of a computer, but also the idea of a database as a metaphor of our own experience of reality.

Databases have developed over time: from inflexible and 'flat', like a phonebook, to wiki's and other online Web 2.0 applications. Today, the computer is the dominant technology, with databases as the dominant cultural configuration. Anything cultural or natural can be recombined. Genetic experiments on animals or an interactive archive of historical photography. De Mul states that all these possibilities can bring about a 'return of aura'. Especially when users are capable of changing and sharing the content of a database, they become part of its virtuality: a performance art.