Wendy Chun – Programmed Visions

Chun’s book looks into the very idea of software, and what it encompasses. She sort of describes technology as this vast unknown, with possibilities we still haven’t thought of yet. Defining hardware becomes difficult without defining software, at which point there is some possibility of encompassing the vast range of functions of hardware. Even still, software itself is very broad. Personally I feel like Chun’s description of hardware versus software is a little too binary – already we’re seeing technology where the two are inseparable and hard to distinguish between. For example – the software if the Nintendo Wii was specific to the Wii, and the physical object of the Wii was dependant on the program that allowed it to run. Chun seems to acknowledge this, and I’d hope her work goes into further depth in that

Matthew Fuller – How to be a Geek

Fuller approaches software similarly to Chun, in that he acknowledges the software is an incredibly broad term, and even within individual software, there’s a ton of variety in operations. So Fuller tackles understanding technology through Geek Culture, which often produces said software. To be a geek is to have a practical obsessive interest in any sort of thing, particularly technology in this context. Geeks largely develop our software, and that software, as a result, becomes more than just an extension of humanity, but its own diverse set of values and meanings. The technology geeks make is reflective of their obsession over it, in that it is filled to the brim with data and potential commands.

Geert Lovink – Sad by Design

The podcast looks at Lovink and his ideas of “platform nihilism”, wherein he looks at how platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc., appear to present a sort of casually negative affect that’s subtle enough to not realize, as well as an atmosphere that lends itself to a sort of depressing mood that follows you even when you close the app. The platforms are reflective of our human nature, but more than that the companies behind each platform work under an agenda to keep you on their respective sites, so they aren’t incentivized to remove morally damaging content if it keeps you coming back.

Søren Bro Pold – New ways of hiding: towards metainterface realism

Pold describes “metainerface realism” – the idea of a system so integrated that data all just sort of converges in a cloud system. Honestly, this reading was a bit complicated and wordy, but at the very least it does get across the basic ideas of our data being sort of stolen without our knowledge and consent, and being coagulated and hidden for whatever business wishes to utilize it. Ideally, we as people who depend on technology should become more critical and technologically literate before allowing our data to go anywhere, but the mechanisms by which our data is taken are often so tricky that it’s hard to understand the scope of it all.

• interactive
• live? performance aspect?
• code-based? (tons?)
  https://editor.p5js.org/iamniky/full/fxnucBhtB
• video(s) (animated, really polished)
• projection
• kinda depends on space..
  
  Space available:
  30″ wall space OR 4′ x 5′ floor space
  

Wendy Chun – Programmed Visions, (book, pp. 1-2, and optionally pp. 3-10)

Software is this intangible but concrete thing. A metaphor that I likened that to, is perhaps how our words are an ephemeral, intangible thing, yet this invisible thing generates incredibly visceral effects. I think about this in how leaders, CEO’s, and teachers are literally able to change the projection of a persons life, sometimes simply through a powerful phrase. I think about how people copyright expressions and phrases, and how even a thing as concrete as language but as fleeting as the moment, can be commodified. I also think about the many people who have perhaps said similar words of similar effects a long time ago, and how that spread of information was naturally spread through conversation, until it got to the hands of someone who could write it down or archive it, or speak it in front of some mass audience that would remember and pass it down to the next generation.

Matthew Fuller – How to be a Geek (book, pp. 12-14, and optionally pp. 63-71)

This article talks about bringing in the conversation of software culture in a way that is accessible to everyone, by using language and forms of expression in ways that relate this “concept” away from just technical experts, and into ways that can be turned into discernible questions and realizations of the problems within. I love the way the Geek is described, and I totally agree with the notion that geeks are in fact running the world. Every company wants an employee that is over-accommodating and zealous in their chase for information, because that chase usually brings new revelations and inventions from within the Geek themselves. This is something rare, because concepts can now be commodified, and it is sad to think about someones life idea or revelation being turned against them in a for-profit if their only way of thinking was to push that idea to the max, simply because of how their brain (and influencing environmental conditions) decided to function around certain ideas. But it is hopeful that there are geeks who geek out to the ideas of problematics, perhaps going beyond their individual scope of understanding their own relation to the issue, to find the relation between us all.

Geert Lovink – Sad by Design (podcast w/ Douglas Rushkoff, 60m)

I believe that the corporations are really trying to separate us, in terms of dividing and conquering our individualities through our more than willing use of social media and metainterfaces. It is easier to take down individuals rather than a whole group of people standing as one, yet even this concept is frightening. Even if we did stand together as one against the elites who perhaps “no longer need us”, and decide to use all the data ever to target individuals. An army is only as strong as its “weakest link”, but by those means, almost everyone is a weak link, because we do not even know what we don’t know. It was really interesting to hear Geert Lovink talk about a metaphor of open-face and honest technology as free-range chickens, as someone is always getting victimized, there is no such thing as open-face in private or public software interaction. It is a “compromise that rubs the wrong way(…) the companies are not in it for the humans (…)”. So it is, in fact, creating a “demilitarized” zone between humans and these companies who still enable conflict on both sides, is just a scapegoat.

Soren Pold – New ways of hiding: towards metainterface realism (article)

The metainterface paradigm is a really scary thing to think about, because it has so many lines of communication as a concept that is limitless, and then it is connected to the industry as a product, while being an entire art/design practice of its own. These core facets of how the meta interface is interacted with today makes it nearly impossible to pinpoint its effects on just one think. It’s a new form of the actual expansion of globalization itself, but one that will continue to surpass itself and become more abstract and complicated, whilst having connections to real tangible forms of mass communication devices. It has already forever changed how globalization has evolved and has planted a seed in peoples minds about how the surface convenience of such meta interfaces are a normal progression of technology. But how can anyone think of this as a normal progression of technology when there is a concept, which can be turned tangible, and then again turned back into a influenceable concept, as just another effect of the progression of computer and software engineering? Something that is able to give influence back is no longer a simple two-to-two interaction, it is a form that is a medium, it has an effect to influence and deceive, not just receive.

Sad By Design:

In the podcast, they talk about how social medias are made and influence us. The main point is that social media has now become vital to how we socially interact with one another. Dumbed down, basically we can’t function as social beings without it. Although, we are highly dependent on social media not only because it’s addictiveness is innate in us, that we don’t even think twice about it but also because how the apps are designed. They are specifically made to target, appeal and be addicting to us. We literally cannot put our phones down.

The counter point to thinking about this is not to change the way the apps are made but to change the way we interact with the app. Most of what draws us to social media is the want to be involved, to have knowledge and to stay connected. As depressing as it sounds, it almost impossible to just say fuck it and ditch your smart phone. But instead we need to reacquaint ourselves with humanity and how we deal with social interactions face to face, no technology involved.

This is super important to delve into. To change how social media runs our lives, we need to step back to the basics to how we run as a society. I’ve been taking an institutional critique class, where we spoke about institutional racism in a similar context. To sum up, how do we take a step back if it’s so ingrained with who we are and how we function? What would it look like in this year? I understand we had a time when technology wasn’t as it is, but how can we be current without it?

Programmed Visions:

New Media is an art form or a study that is all based around software. In this current day, we’re so attracted to the internet. We’re constantly searching it and adding to it. Through software, we are able to get new knowledge and information that let us navigate and add to our experience as a society. But there is so much data and information being collected out there that there is no way to ever get to the bottom of it. We don’t even know what information our phones or computers are retaining for us. As we add to software, software also excels from itself, it’s an entrance to the unknown, which also makes it a paradox.

Thinking how this relates to new media, is new media a search into the black hole of the unknown?

How To Be a Geek:

Being a geek is highly related to technology and a sort of obsession within the world created with technology. This article looks at how we, as geeks, are starting to create a language about software. As we know, software is a vast unknown explored area, and as geeks, we’re constantly trying to gain all the information we can about a subject. But when it comes to software, it’s nearly impossible to know everything you can with it. Can you imagine knowing everything on the internet?

Geeks themselves as well have always been looked down upon, I remember the computer geek as a big persona when I was a kid, especially because my brother was one. There are things like geek squad, which is literally a company made to help you with your technologies. But now as software and technology are all around us, it’s time to real claim geeks as a positive thing. Heck yes knowledge.

New Ways of Hiding:

We all know that our devices are actively watching and tracking us. Till last week, I really didn’t know to what degree we’re actually being watched, which is literally our every move. The meta-interface of our technologies is where we are being watched and all of our data being stored. It’s what knows us and draws us back to it. It’s plainly like we are being monitored in ways that we can’t even think of, and we give into it. I choose to use my phone and social media every day, and I’m quite honestly unconsciously addicted to it.

Meta-interfaces are everywhere and in every smart technology that we use. How can we escape if we’re being watched?

But in a sense that we’re all being watched, how likely is it that I am actually being watched, like whose is looking at my stuff? What importance is it?

Wendy Chun – Programmed Visions, (book, pp. 1-2, and optionally pp. 3-10)
Software is the underlying agent in new media. You don’t have to write code to use it as the Adobe programs are software as well. It’s the software that allows us new ways to navigate and research our world, yet software is difficult to understand. No one knows how everything works, so there is this constant element of the unknown, and so a paradox of exploring the unknown with the unknown.

How can we make software more known? Can we?


Matthew Fuller – How to be a Geek (book, pp. 12-14, and optionally pp. 63-71)
Geeking out is kin to being obsessive. A geek is enthusiastic and driven to know more and more about whatever it is they’re geeking out about. Typically geeks are related to technology, and the new media geeks out there today are living in a sweet time of development and change. Software and digital technologies are blooming and giving us a new way to visualize abstract ideas. However, those who aren’t so enthusiastic about software and such are left in the dust, so to speak. There is a pretty big gap between those who know and those who don’t, and this inevitably leads to the geeks creating and deciding everything regarding software.

What kinds of things can we do to bridge the gap, or at least create a common knowledge or literacy regarding software?


Geert Lovink – Sad by Design (podcast w/ Douglas Rushkoff, 60m)
Social media platforms, and other forms of digital technology these days have an anti-human agenda. Instead of using a product, people are the product. The software is designed to lure, hook, and keep our attention. While we know this, it is very difficult to remove ourselves from these services because they are deeply intertwined with our offline lives; we feel connected to others when we see that they are “online”, as if it were a real meeting place. This, in turn, adds to the sadness that online media provides. We think we are connected, but we miss out on the real-world connections. Instead of smashing the phone, we’re urged to overcome the phone.

What ways can we work towards “overcoming the phone”, or at least not letting it control our lives?


Soren Pold – New ways of hiding: towards metainterface realism (article)
The metainterface is the hidden framework, or main controlling component, of digital media. It aims to be invisible, and psychological tactics are used to cover it up, make it look pretty, and keep us coming back for more. The metainterface is where our data is collected, and where the results of our data is fed back to us.

While generally invisible, you can catch a glimpse of (part of) Facebook’s metainterface by using Safebook. This extension removes everything from Facebook except the functions: the functionality of the spaces to click, type, and more, yet no decoration. This allows us to see many of the ways we give Facebook our information. After using Safebook and turning it off, there is still the eerie metainterface lingering in the background. All the bones and buttons and varying avenues of data collection, they’re all there, just dolled up to grab our attention and take what data we feed them.

Should we have strict guidelines regarding internet usage? What kinds of impacts could this have on future users?

How to be a geek:
This article talks about how we are just starting to develop and teach everyone a language that explains software and how it works. This is because software is so complex and it’s hard to teach and understand the multitude of ways that it can be “understood, experienced, (and) put into play.” These conversations about software needs to be extended beyond the private conversations between those who are proficient with tech. A geek is someone who knows almost too much about their subject – they gush about their interest in something which can make others feel awkward by overenthusiasm – they find the information “dry” and boring. Geeks rule in their companies – usually in powerful positions. I really enjoyed this fun, educational definition of a geek and how that term is looked down upon but is actually very important. 

Do you think it will take a long time to develop a proficient language that explains software? “Software” is very general, so that can be narrowed down to just a specific software you know as well. Do you think a simple guidebook could be made quickly and be the answer? Or is any software too complex to define in just writing or through language?

Introduction: Software, a Supersensible Sensible Thing:
Story of 6 blind men and elephant. All were right to some extent, but were also all wrong. Comparable to the internet and software. Focuses on the idea of software becoming a metaphor for a lot of things – like “the mind, for culture, for ideology, for biology, and for the economy.” “Computers have become metaphors for all ‘effective procedures,’ that is, for anything that can be solved in a prescribed number of steps, such as gene expression and clerical work.” Software is difficult to comprehend, which encourages ignorance – but that is not the way to go. Software illuminates an unknown, and does so through unknowable software which makes it a paradox. 

I feel like we are like the 6 blind men and the elephant; we each know and understand something about different softwares. So, I guess the question is should we work together to educate each other? Or is this something we should expect the professionals to do? Like, should they be sharing their knowledge with us in the sense that ‘fair is fair’, or should we just focus on working together on our own time to learn new things about new softwares?

Sad by Design:
In this podcast, they start with the idea that people have now been taught that humans are bad and technology is the savior. The two speakers are on ‘Team Human’. They further dive into how kids of today are more and more attached to media – especially social media. They feel like they need to check it every few minutes and can’t get away. It’s being built into our brains. This need is also built into how all the programs are designed. They also talk about how even though we have more connections it doesn’t release the endorphins we release in person – so it’s inherently a sad version of socialization. Also, our online selves are often meant to not reflect our real selves – which, again, sort of seems to defeat the purpose. 

As people who all participate in social media, why do you think our social media personas ARE personas? I ask this because I feel it’s sort of a subconscious thing we do; so why do you feel that we respond in this way?

New way of hiding: towards metainterface realism: 
This is the scary article – the one that talks about how suddenly so many devices and softwares that we use – that we CHOOSE to use – are monitoring us in ways that we can’t see or expect. The scary part is the part about, again, how we choose to use it; these metainterfaces are being built into almost everything we use. In that sense, we want to use them because they are in things that make our lives easier and that we can use every day. However, these things are gathering information on us every second of the day – tracking and mapping our location and paths and learning what we like. These are all things we don’t agree to and this makes it all the more scary. 

Since these metainterfaces are in everything we use nowadays (think phones especially) do you think we can escape an age where this happens? For example, do you think laws will be put in sooner than later that protect future generations (since ours are probably too documented to escape at this point), or do you think we will secretly be monitored regardless?

For the BFA show, I’m doing a book installation.

Over the course of last semester and this semester, I’ve been making large scale paper sheets at the Fresh Press studio. Each sheet is 18 x 24 inches and is made from recycled cotton – bedsheets, loads of my old work – basically the paper is made from all recycled / sustainable material. My plan is to bind each sheet and create a large scale collage book.

The installation part has to do with the environment in which I present the book. Along with my giant paper sheet making, I’ve also been experimenting and making paper “paper paintings” by using different colored pulp to create images. I’ve been painting on a lot of my old ‘gone wrong’ photographs to create mini 4 x 6-inch textured colored paintings. Together I wanted to great a mobile effect over the book. Ideally, it’d be the book on a pedestal in the of the installation. The painted photographs + paper images would create a circle around it, thus you have to walk into the environment and be immersed into my brainchild to “read” the book.

I’ve also been making loads of other, smaller imaged based zines, and depending on space of pedestal I’d like to display a few as well.

Kind of like creating a little reading nook world for reading zines + hand made books.

I was thinking of what really got me interested in art, which is portraiture. I always really liked drawing and painting portraits of people, but these would all be people I had never met before, or people who came from my imagination.

I’m interested in maybe revisiting my love for portraiture, and sketching the friends I feel closest to after all my years in college, somehow involving the friends I’ve made here.

Other ideas:
– relationships between people: what makes you feel close to someone?
– what makes you feel uncomfortable around someone?
-first impressions
– people posting online vs. their actual selves
– growing up

** UPDATE **

The thing that I’m the most interested in, and want to explore, are First Impressions. I’m not super sure what kind of medium or method I’d like for this particular artwork to be in. I was first thinking of having photographs or drawings of people and then have it be kind of participatory? But I don’t really know clearly what I’d like to do in general. Maybe something interactive so people can write their first impressions?

Wendy Chun – Programmed Visions

It seems impossible for us to know the global picture of new media. Due to the invisibility, ubiquity and alleged power of new media, know the extent, content, and effects of new media seems impossible.

So people started to look into what seems to be common to all new media objects and moments: software in order to have an understanding/ try to have an overview of new media.

Software is a visibly invisible or invisibly visible essence. 

It is the invisible whole that generates the sensuous parts. To know software has become a form of enlightenment. 

Based on metaphor, the software has become a metaphor for the mind, for culture, for ideology, for biology, and for the economy. s a universal imitator/machine, it encapsulates a logic of general substitutability: a logic of ordering and creative, animating disordering. Computers become a metaphor. Software engenders a sense of profound ignorance because of its clarity. We usually don’t know what’s behind our interface. But as a metaphor for metaphor, new media actually has more power. This ambiguous is building a new way to our increasingly complex world.

Matthew Fuller – How to be a Geek (book, pp. 12-14, and optionally pp. 63-71)

Writing about software is to try to draw outdoor conditions that are particular to the way in which computational systems. Computer science has become a fundamental cultural and political. We should treat this as a serious individual culture/ field of study instead of an integral field of other disciplines. Geeks are a group of people who have certain characteristics, they build a huge part in our contemporary life. Geeks created the internet and fight over its meaning. Contemporary technology is not simply an extension of a man. It’s stuffed the way of interpreting the world into a logical abstraction way. Study software requires us to combine computer science part with cultural theories.

Geert Lovink – Sad by Design (podcast w/ Douglas Rushkoff, 60m)

It seems that surveillance capitalism has become the fundamental element of studying new media. Technology will be our evolutionary successor. The speaker talked about a lot of things. Europe is expected to become a force to “fight against” the surveillance capitalism since it does not have it’s own silicon Vally and strict government controls like China. The change is unlikely to come from technology tycoons inside the industry. 

Soren Pold – New ways of hiding: towards metainterface realism (article)

Metainterface is a new interface paradigm. It makes the interface more abstract and ubiquitous. There are two ways of hiding, hide behind the simplified user interface and hide in the internal worlds. Interface draws on an engineering tradition to make itself disappear in transparency. It under both our willingness( the agreement) yet out of our willingness(we don’t know what exactly they are).   

Live camera time-lapse that runs on a loop but gradually fades. People see who were standing before them (code)

Video montage :: DDP 

App design plugin :: IG random liker