User:Marlon/selfdirectedtext

Self Directed Research Essay

Abstract

My work of the last few years has been related to the Internet, its viral workings, the people and communities found online and how they express themselves. I'm fascinated by how we experience news events via new online tools, which makes us feel very informed but also increasingly detached.

Recent work

(see also: project descriptions)

Pirate Bay Archive

Description:

This project was inspired by (and uses) an XML-file of 75MB, created by Karel Bilek, that consists of around 1,6 million torrent files that at one point appeared on Pirate Bay. I created a website that randomly displays one item from this list. When a users clicks on the item, a link makes it possible to start downloading the file. When the page is refreshed, a new file is displayed, and the background colour of the website turns pink or green. The colors refer to the skulls displayed on Pirate Bay that show you when a download is trusted (pink) or vip (green). An ASCII image, of the Pirate Bay logo at the top remains unchanged.

Peer-to-Peer-to-Peer-to-Peer

Description:

My most recent work, Peer-to-Peer-to-Peer-to-Peer, is a small installation piece. It consists of A4-size papers placed on a white wall. Printed on each page is a diagram of a peer-to-peer network or system. The peers in the network are mostly represented as computer desktops (or laptops), arranged together to form a circle, square or other shape. Lines and arrows symbolize the connections between the 'nodes'. In newer images, the nodes resemble human figures caught in a web of endless connections. Simultaneously the design of the images goes from simple, black and white diagrams to shiny Web 2.0 graphics. The printed pages overlap, connecting the peers of one diagram to those of another, forming a larger network of peer-to-peer networks.

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Other:

Peers can form a network of nodes in which they share data peer-to-peer, without any central coordination. This peer-to-peer system was developed in 1993, but became more popular when online file sharing services, like Napster, appeared. 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.

As a designer, these graphics fascinate me. Not only do the images show their age in how they look and how large their file-size is, they also illustrate the increasing social impact of the peer-to-peer system. The peers in the network are commonly represented as computer desktops (or laptops) in a neat diagram, connected with lines or arrows. But lately, these nodes have started to look more like humans caught in a web of endless connections. Simultaneously their design goes from simple, black and white diagrams to shiny and colorful Web 2.0 graphics.

My recent work, Peer-to-Peer-to-Peer-to-Peer, is an small installation piece. 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 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, where the diagrams are connected, forming a large network of peer-to-peer networks.

.NFO

Pirated content is often accompanied by a .NFO file with useful information about the downloaded file, like subtitle information and installation instructions. They're an interesting cross between a straight-forward readme file and a personalized business card, used to inform you of the release group behind the content. Their 90's aesthetics, often including ASCII-art, show their origin in the warez scene (The Scene), where .NFO files were used as a sort of press release.

Back in the early PC days information contained in the .NFO files was both to inform the user, but also for release groups to list their BBS phone numbers - hoping to attract a larger group of users and content. Using .NFO files added only a few bytes to a release, as file size was critically important in dial-up days.

Not a finished project or work, the .NFO file has been one of my recent research topics. It relates to my peer-to-peer project: .NFO files are a prominent tradition within the file sharing subculture. As a graphic designer I am fascinated with its graphical language. 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.

These technical boundaries, like a limited toolbox, are very interesting to me. Also: the "corporate identity" of individuals or groups of people that manifest themselves online.

Older work

Related to boundaries/toolbox:

My graduation thesis, about (hyper)reality, was printed on 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.

Related to peer-to-peer project:

PSYOP

The internet is, of course, extremely repetitive. This becomes even more obvious when following news events online. Not only can you view the official articles on newspaper websites, there's the possibility to constantly refresh blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others for the latest update. I have finished two previous projects that investigate this aspect of the Web.

In 2009 two Colorado parents set up an elaborate hoax, pretending their son had taken off in a helium filled gas balloon. The news spread like wildfire, and I followed it live via a variety of websites. A large number of people had a lot of different things to say about the situation, from speculation to jokes to poems. The balloon boy became an internet meme.

It seemed as if anyone with access to a keyboard wanted to contribute to the story, so I started collecting. A lot of the same sentiments or jokes were expressed via different online platforms. I started to focus on just the comments made by a large variety of users on one forum in particular. These comments became the content of a book of poems (PSYOP), each chapter focusing on a specific amount of time during the incident. The poems, or comments, printed with a fancy font on offwhite paper, tell the story.

"In July 2011, Richard Heene auctioned the balloon, selling it to Mike Fruitman, an Aurora, Colorado businessman, for $2,502.
Heene said that proceeds would go to victims of the March 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami." (Wikipedia)

Tsunami by proxy

This fascination with virality in relation to the World Wide Web, led to another extensive Google search of images. The subject: an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. I selected the most common images that accompanied articles, blogs or tweets about the tsunami, even if those images were not taken in Japan at all. (Natural) disasters are visual stories and the images that most accurately capture the imagination of the viewer are very popular online.

The images were printed on postcards, as they often refer to a specific location. In this case not only to the actual site of the disaster, but – by adding the URL on the back of the card – to the source of the image as well. Placing these cards on the floor in a chronological order symbolises the viral spread of online pictures, while at the same time a pattern is created that shows the course of a natural disaster.

Themes/Methods

(see also: poster)

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

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.