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Reading Responses

Week 2 - Ulises Carrión - Mail Art and the Big Monster from Second Thoughts 11 unread reply.1111 replies.

To be honest, I don't find this argument to be entirely compelling, but it's possible I misunderstood. Carrión says that Mail Art knocks at the door of the big monster or is a weapon thrown against it. Maybe I don't know well enough the history of Mail Art, but I think its a bit arrogant to say that the big monster cares whatsoever. I think the big monster takes the money for postage, sends your art, and forgets. I think Mail Art walks past the big monster, but I don't think said monster feels threatened. I do agree that, in the ways Carrión stated, Mail Art is not really easy, cheap, or unpretentious. However, it was made more pretentious when someone uttered "the best Mail Art is..." and more difficult when someone said "an artist does not become a Mail artist when XYZ." So, I agree when Carrión acknowledges the deficiency of Mail Art, and for that reason don't understand how it then be part of a guerilla war against the big monster. Maybe the rhetoric lost me, but I feel like these aspects of Mail Art need to be altered in some way before it can be part of a war against the big monster. For now, I think whatever's happening here is one-sided.

1. Is Carrión trying to say that he wants these things to change so that Mail Art can actually fight against the big monster?

2. Why does he announce that "we cannot imagine a piece of Mail Art that does not use words, or drawings, or plastic," but then later asks for more [new] ideas for Mail Art? And that he'd be receptive to them? Personally, I think the former statement is limiting. It then makes the latter request sound inauthentic and the entire closing paragraph sarcastic.

Week 3 - Laurel Schwulst & Édouard U - Selections from Creative Independent and Arena How Do You Use the Internet Mindfully

WOW! I loved Laurel's take on website production, it feels like something I've been trying to put my finger on for a while. I have always wanted to journal, but have never been able to commit. I really love the idea of recording my life an thoughts in a more visual way, rather than just with writing (although I do write). I love using my instagram (I've been told I carefully construct it). I think that social media can be very problematic, and people are often obsessed with their self image, however I get a lot of joy from making collages and taking pictures of myself and the world around me. I like putting posts together. I don't have very many followers, I don't get a lot of likes, and I don't really care about that. HOWEVER, I love the idea of investing in a personal website rather than a social media platform. My first ever website was a 'digital diary' which is very on brand with me obsessively wanting to journal. Still, that website and a few of my other website projects, are more like the stone in the ocean. I made it, it was fun to make, and now I've moved on. My most recent website (my creative portfolio for grad applications) is like a shelf; very simple and lays out my projects. I'll update it just like I'd add a book or take off a trinket, but I won't focus too much on it. Eventually, I want to build a garden that takes the things I love about instagram and pinterest and puts it into something I created from the ground up. The idea of the web as a place is great and that the web should be for individuals not companies is better. Sometimes, I question why I want to work in digital/web design because it feeds into things I don't really like about society and the internet, and this makes me feel worlds better. (I can also attest to the anxiety of knowing HTML/CSS and still feeling like I don't know how to actually make a website.)

1. How do we educate people on the real infrastructure of the internet? The fact that people don't understand it, except for the few that study it or read articles like this, is a huge problem. Learning the infrastructure teaches you a lot about who holds the power and how they use/misuse it.

2. One thing about social media and visibility: a lot of people use social media platforms instead of a personal website because they want to be seen, and personal websites are harder for other people to find. If we want to transition away from social media, how can we make personal projects more visible? And don't we think that there is a risk that personal websites could snowball into another form of toxic social media? Is that the nature of the internet within a capitalist hellscape?

Week 4 - Olia Lialina - STILL THERE Ruins and Templates of Geocities from Lost and Living (in) Archives

Reading this article helped me bring this fact into focus: the internet is forever, but only for now. Yes once you put something on the internet, it can be stored, found, and accessed even if you try to delete it. But, what about in a 100 years? What happens if the places that we store our data are cleared or become defunct. Geocities carried so much data that could only be stored because someone thought ahead. People these days like to stress the permanence of the internet, and this just reminded me that in the long-term, it's really not as permanent as we think it is.

1. Should we feel comforted or scared by what happened with Geocities?

2. How would you guys feel if something similar happened to the internet as we know it?

3. What kind of data would you want to be recovered in that situation?

4. Has anyone seen the most recent Mission Impossible movie? How did it make you guys feel? Cause I was pretty disturbed...

Week 6 - Bojana Coklyat & Shannon Finnegan - Selections from Alt-Text as Poetry Workbook

I think it is really important to highlight the distinction between image description and alt-text, as the former is a catch-all term which includes things that are often supplementary rather than meant to replace. I also really connect with the notion that alt-text is a form of translation. I have experience trying to translate languages that don't come naturally to anyone anymore, like Latin, and it really does feel like certain ideas are lost in the process. Not only do individual words carry slightly different meanings, but there are also nuances in what various cultures consider good, bad, normal, etc.. In the same way that different cultures may perceive the concept of green differently, visually impaired people conceptualize and attach meaning to visual ideas in a different way. Being aware of the gap is important; not everything that seems simply understood to you is simple to everyone else.

1. When would you insert yourself as the creator while writing alt-text? Would you be inclined to write as "I" or would you try to stay as objective as possible about the content on the page? Is that even possible?

2. What happens when the site itself is the image, the piece of art? Where do you put alt-text for the artistic choices you made when building the site as a whole? The images here, the descriptions there, the background is this... for a reason right?

Week 8 - _A Personal Computer for Children of All Cultures_ from Decolonising the Digital

To be honest, this article made me feel a bit overwhelmed at the enormity of the world's digital infrastructure problems. Nasser has a lot of valid concerns about the inaccessibility of the digital world to non-english speakers. I think there are many ways that these concerns also tie to the relationship between physical infrastructure and internet access. This access is manipulated by governments and the private (Western) companies which control the literal internet cables. When I hear or read about all the ways that the digital world is inaccessible, I wonder if there's even a way to fix anything well because of how interconnected the problems are. I also don't see a world in which these governments or private companies would want to change anything, given how they benefit. Sometimes I wonder if the internet/digital spaces are even worth the trouble.

1. The idea of a computer for every child is a bit dystopian, even if the intended message is access to education. Is the digital world even the place for education? Just because there is a lot of information to access, doesn't mean its good for children's brain to have it all at the their fingertips that young.

2. In regards to all of our infrastructure problems, it feels like making an accessible coding language is just putting bandaid on a missing limb. Is it even possible to completely overhaul the digital world with small steps?

https://www.criticalinfralab.net/

Week 9 - Ben Duvall - Selections from New Modernism(s)

I think the idea of hypermodernism and its relationship to exponentiality goes beyond graphic design. I'm currently building a presentation for another class on microtrends and the Gothic, and I'm seeing a similar kind of exponential development when I look at fashion. In the past, I feel like human culture, with its many facets, changed naturally and slowly over time [likely with a few exclusions]. The digital age has made it so that culture can shift easily and artificially, with great speed. We are in a constant state of change, and it almost feels like we can experience a decade of cultural change in just a year. The digital space has given us access to too much information; it makes sense that the circumstances in which we design cause our work to be similarly packed full of information. One of the first things I thought about was memes, which started out fairly simplistic but now can contain layers of meaning with multiple references to memes of the past.

1. Where do you guys see hypermodernism beyond graphic design?

2. Be honest: how much of the underlying meaning behind signs is actually unconsciously understood by the average person in the way that academics have described it, and how much of this meaning is simply intellectually created by the people writing articles like this?

Week 11 - Dot Tuer - Beyond the New Media Frame The Poetics of Absence in Vera Frenkel’s String Games

I'm going to go on a tangent:

I decided that academia is not really a long-term place for me and my future, because I have difficult time getting into academic writing. I'm a yapper, I love drama and poetics and convoluted sentences, but ultimately something that bothers me most about academia, is that it is really inaccessible to a lot of readers. This article was beautifully written, but incredibly difficult to read. I had a hard time understanding certain parts, even after a couple tries. It felt a bit like translation. All of this is really beside the point, but whenever I come across this sort of issue, I have an internal debate about whether or not I appreciate the prose. There are pros and cons, of course we shouldn't be over-simplifying writing to an extreme degree obviously. However, I feel like academics forget that the most important part of their job is to spread knowledge and make it accessible to those wanting to learn. Occasionally, this writing-style comes across as self-aggrandizing, regardless of a valid thesis.

Anyway:

The quote from Marshall McLuhan on the expanse of a global media-related nervous system abolishing time and space really peaked my interest. This is something that I think about ALL the time. It is shocking to me how the digital world has given access to an unlimited quantity of knowledge to children, such that time and space are almost meaningless. Like, for a basic example, I don't think it's healthy for a child to have access to lives of as many adults as they can now see with the internet. Witnessing this many faces and lifestyles is actually a little bit horrifying because of the constant comparison to oneself, during the critical developmental years to boot. I think that this cause severe mental health problems, simply because you know about things that you can necessarily have, even if you desperately want them. And don't even get me started on para-social relationships. Having access to information is a blessing and a curse, and in some ways ignorance is truly bliss.

1. I guess I wonder what other people's takes on this are. Like obviously the internet and digital world can do so many fantastic things, but does that outweigh the harm?

2. In what ways does our generation read this article differently than someone our parents/grandparents age?

Week 12 - Paul Soulellis - Performing the Feed

I liked this article/talk a lot. What it made me think about was, first, surveillance that seems to listen to you even when your phone isn't on, and, second, the shrinking attention span of social media / internet users. I was talking to my friend about something recently on a walk when she suggested I buy a certain product. That night, I get an ad for it. This phenomena is so common that users are no longer freaked out by it; they're totally desensitized. I've seen TikToks or reels that make it a joke. So Soulellis's point that we are becoming too comfortable with surveillance rings pretty true to me.

The shrinking of the attention span is very real. I've noticed it in myself and its talked about on social media too. Users also joke about it, because they think its funny or scary or both. There are reels where a scene from a movie is playing right next to someone playing a phone app. We watch both at the same time, and then scroll to the next part of the movie. I think the live streaming discussion is interesting, and I definitely think live streams would be less prevalent without the chat element. People want to have conversations while they watch. Lately, People need to be doing at least two things at once OR one thing for less than 30 seconds and on to the next. I attribute part of this, in my own case, to an attention deficit disorder... but I wonder if there is a nurture aspect to something like that, which the prevalence of the internet and social media is exacerbating in developing children.

1. Do any of you feel like you've lost your ability to hold your attention as you've gotten older?

2. Are you guys comfortable with the level of surveillance going on? Why don't you do anything to combat it?

Week 13 - Neta Bomani & Sabii Borno - Beyond Dark Matter from Logic Issue 15 Beacons

First, I love the cover art.

I thought the use of the acronym STEAM is really interesting. It's not something I've really heard of before, though I've obviously heard of STEM. Very often, Art isn't tied to STEM, especially pre-college, so I feel like that's an intentional choice.

I think this story deals with really important topics regarding the narratives that inform technology as we know it today. This could be as simple as the words we choose to describe inanimate objects, disregarding their clear connections to historical events. This relates more to the history of technology. Who gets credited, and who gets erased? Who controls the direction of development, and what do we name functions or devices? Before delete was delete, it was kill. In another direction, this could be the history that becomes canonical and inescapable on the web. Who controls what information is easily available? Who controls what gets removed / taken down? Some history is easy to find, and some more detailed or honest versions take more digging to find.

I do like the way that this text ends on something optimistic: that we can update (though never fully undo) narratives by approaching tech / computing and asserting our own power.

1. Has anybody else heard of STEAM? I could be crazy.

2. How often do you guys believe "conspiracy" theories? Where do you draw the line between trusting widely accepted narratives and distrusting them?

Week 14 - Boris Groys - Art on the Internet

I'm interested in what Groys has to say about the difference between politics and art. I think the idea that politics disappears into its consequences while art remains has some weight, but I think there are holes in the argument. Groys says that politics is absorbed by its results to make room for the politics of the future, and in a lot of ways this is correct. Right-wing ideas from the 20th century, like the war on drugs, have continued to negatively affect certain communities, especially Black communities, well into the 21st century... although the war on drugs is technically not a political movement anymore. However, not all politics disappear. Political figures frequently call upon figures of the past in order to garner support. Make America Great Again as a slogan uses the politics of the past to gain support in the present. You can see this kind of thing with many different groups... Communists, Fascists, etc.. Many current, and especially radical, political groups call upon the past for validity. Political figures do not disappear, they are used as examples. Politics is not constantly moving forward based on whatever consequences and letting go of the past easily. In fact, many groups ignore obvious consequences or place blame incorrectly, so that they can continue to tout their same old ideas, promising that it'll work this time. I think Groys is ignoring the fact that politics is not just legislation. While some political ideas disappear, not all of them do. I mean, Fascist Germany and Italy used the ancient Greeks and Romans in order to validate their nationalist, fascist, and eugenicist ideas. The USA is not a democracy, it's a republic, and our political structure is directly influenced by the Roman Republic. Politics comes and goes in cycles. History is used and misused in the present. So, while I understand the point Groys is trying to make, I think he is over simplifying a very complex phenomena. Politics remains and is used in the future in a very similar way to art; it does not disappear when it is done, not really.

Art is also incredibly political; even thousands of years after its creation, it can create new political conversations. Art does not exist outside of some historical context. We may lose its past context but if art is looked upon by people with thoughts, it has some context within time. Death of the author, blah blah blah... you may be able to kill the artist but you can't kill audience reaction/opinion and what that says about current society. That is historical context.

Separately, to say that artists make their art for present and for the archives is a bold stretch. Maybe the artists Groys cares about do that, but not all artists make art for the same reason. Not all art is created for others or is created with time in mind.

1. Do you guys agree with his take? Do we think that art and politics is so distinctly and simply separated?

2. Do you think art should exist in the archive, out of context?

Section 1 Assignment 1

King of Spades, ASCII Art

King of Spades, ASCII Art

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Section 1 Assignment 2

Assemblage

Assemblage, Real Life Picture
Assemblage in CSS Art

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Section 1 Assignment 3

Looking for a sign?

Snapshot of Tarot Car Site

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Section 2 Assignment 1

DSGN 1020 Webring

Snapshot of Webring

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Section 2 Assignment 2

Playing dress up!

Snapshot of dress up site

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Section 2 Assignment 3

p5.js clock

Snapshot of p5.js clock, bloodmoon with stars

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Section 3 Assignment 1

A Scripted Activity

snapshot of the DSGN 1020 playlist on spotify

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Section 3 Assignment 2

IFTTT Applet

snapshot of the IFTTT applet site

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Section 3 Assignment 3

Rorshach Test

a inkblot image made with the Rorshach Test site

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Olivia holding an apple
Olivia in winter gear
Olivia in a skirt
Olivia in jorts
Olivia in a leather jacket
Olivia in sunglasses and winter gear
Olivia in a cardigan