This reminds me of one of the mesmerising films Andy showed earlier. I’m more taken by it for other more pressing reasons. I can definitely relate to the way this guy feels. I got the link for it at fontfeed.com. Here’s the creator’s own comment: “Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline”.
PS – many thanks to Brian for pointing out that the final show website has issues in Internet Explorer 7. I’ve just spent a while fixing most of them but now my housemate’s computer seems to have got stuck on it at one state and it’s still not showing the menu. I can’t disable the cache on it either. Aargh! I will fix it in the morning. Honestly, I marvel at the attitude of a company who respond the poor quality of their product by giving its key users the tools to fix their product’s inadequacies by giving them a conditional statement for css. The frustrating thing is that I checked it a few times in IE, but now I come to think of it the later occasions were in IE8. Crap.
This kind of thing is exactly what I’m talking about when I say I’m excited about the possibilities of my humjam website. I want to draw links between what this guy’s talking about and things happening in art and beyond.
I don’t want to talk about it in too much depth here as I’d need thousands of words and this is not the time for that. In brief, he’s talking about the power of social media and the way it’s dog-gone blowing everything we know and hold dear to small pieces.
I’ve been testing a simple poll script that has a few advantages. These include cookies that stop people from filling out the questionnaire twice, a pie chart that gives results immediately after filling the form out (which is linked to the Google API) and a simple form based admin process that means I can create a questionnaire in ten minutes.
I think I want my questionnaire to appear on humjam in a modal window. This is a window that floats over the top of the main page of a website. My reason for wanting this is that I’m inclined to think the questionnaire should have its own space on the website. With a modal window the rest of the site is displayed behind a semi transparent background over which the modal window content hovers. This is great because the modal window contents are the only thing the user can see, ie – the questionnaire and not the humjam logo and links. At the same time, it’s easy to get back to the main site.
I just spent the evening trying to get the linoluna wordpress theme to fit in with the rest of the humjam design I’m doing. I’m not sure how that’s going to come out. As it stands, I can’t get it to look right. I can’t see it ever feeling really consistent with the rest of the site. There’s also a most popular post widget on the side that I can’t seem to get rid of. Hmm. Problem. I think at some stage I’m going to have to learn WordPress inside out and make my own theme. That sounds weirdly like fun. One for August and September though, I think. I might also have another bash at linoluna as a stop gap tomorrow.
One thing I liked in earlier experiments was the pixelated photographs I used in the background of my prototype questionnaire. I have decided to use these as background images on my humjam website. Each time someone goes to a different page or refreshes there will be a different, random pixelated image. Some of them are rather nice and I’m going to put them here as things in their own right.
The final show website is now done. Everyone who’s seen it seems quite happy with it. Here’s the link: http://mada2009.madigitalarts.co.uk. Please click on the images for bigger versions.
I woke up in the middle of the night earlier this week and wrote this in my notebook. It’s quite unfinished due to the circumstances of writing but it’s quite a nice start to articulating what I think about theory. I’m going to develop a little on what I originally wrote as I go but there’ll most likely still be a couple of inconsistencies in here. I’ll try to hone it down more at some point. I wouldn’t mind talking about it with someone, too.
Theory is like a toy. It’s quite plastic. You can reposition it into a configuration that suits. It’s often seen as a very serious thing but there is no need for this attitude. It’s only our servant in understanding art. It’s all too often treated as the master. Let’s not be bullied by it. Let’s invoke it when it suits us and let’s put it back in the cupboard when there’s a danger of tripping over it.
I’ve spent a fair bit of today trying to get this tutorial working. webdesignermag.co.uk. It’s supposed to make a poll and chart in Flash that connects to a MySQL database. I can’t get it to connect to my database though.
People said this was too fast so I’ve slowed it down a bit. I’m still not that happy with it. It describes a few things about the way I’ve approached the project though. The text is copied and pasted below as well.
I was going to put my questionnaire on its own site. I was going to call it www.all-questionnaire.com. I’ve decided I don’t want to do this. Instead I have bought the domain http://www.humjam.com, which will be a website with a much broader purpose and will feature work by artists other than me. For it to get an audience it needs to be on a site that has some status as a destination in a more general sense. I think the way to achieve this is to create a website that will host more and more art in the future, by many different artists. This way the site will steadily generate more and more incoming links, become more and more searchable with time and will hopefully be a valuable resource.
I’m calling it humjam because the name fell into my head and it stuck. I thought of all sorts of others but they were all taken or just weren’t as good. Humjam is short, semi-alliterative and whenever I’ve told people the name they’ve all read different meanings in it. One friend said it was similar to the Farsi word for ‘Everything comes here’, though he did say his Farsi isn’t that great so I do need to check it with someone who speaks fluent Farsi.
I like this website. www.icastic.com
I am tempted to ask people to submit drawings for my questionnaire as well.
Maybe my show space will have a little area with crayons. That would be fun. I like the sense that people can get involved with the work in a more direct way. That’s part of the idea in the first place, after all.
I’ve just read ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by Walter Benjamin and won’t feel like I have done a Digital Arts MA at all if I don’t write a post about it. It says a lot of very interesting things, which have prescience today. I suppose that’s why people quote it all the time. I’m also experimentally putting a drawing on this post because lots of my posts are really long and have no pictures, which looks boring.
The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production.” p212
In other words, when crazy technological advances happen, it takes a while for culture to catch up.
Here are some more quotes about interactivity and participatory art. I feel the need to respond to them because they’re relevant to my project and my developing thoughts. As much as anything I think they throw a bit of light on how I see interactivity in the context of my project.
In an interview with Davis, Tilam Baumgärtel asked whether the sentence (This referring to The world’s first collaborative sentence by Douglas Davis) was truly interactive or was rather just another kind of form filling, common on the Net. That question acutely raised the issue of whether contributors to such works are any more than sociological specimens who supply data for the artist.
I’ve found a very useful piece of context for my questionnaire. It’s a book by the playwright Max Frisch called
'Sketchbook 1966-1971'. It features a series of questionnaires that pose some quite challenging questions. There are nine or ten of these questionnaires in the book and each one takes on a different theme. These questionnaires were quite highly acclaimed when the book was released. I can’t help but feel a lot of them are quite reductive though. A lot of it seems to be a Socratic form of argument with Frisch bullying people into sharing his beliefs.
Each questionnaire consists of twenty five questions. Here’s a sample of questions from the different questionnaires:
The human condition in general
Are you sure you are really interested in the preservation of the human race once you and all the people you know are no longer alive? State briefly why.
If you had the power to put into effect things you consider right, would you do so against the wishes of the majority (yes or no) Why not if you think they are right?
What in your opinion do others dislike about you, and what do you dislike about yourself? If not the same thing, which do you find it easier to excuse?
I just saw this on Flowing Data. I think this kind of thing might provide a very raw blueprint for my own graphs and charts. I like the page full of bars and percentages thing. I remember at the start of the course I blogged that I was a bit influenced by the way I felt when I looked at picture books as a child.I loved all of the details and joining up the different parts.
Anyway, I like this. I wouldn’t mind seeing it get a bit more curated though. For example, what are the likely consequences of the massive disparity of annual births between developing and industrialised countries? Can well presented data begin to suggest answers, or at least inroads in to answers to such questions?
I’ve also read a few things about the tendency to get carried away with technology and software rather than take control of it and use it to fully realise a work’s potential. An artist called Jonathan Harris gave this talk at the Flash on the Beach conference last year.
I haven’t really said anything about my PGPD in my blog. I learnt a lot from writing it. It would be a shame not to make more out of it in the wider context of my project. The essay was about participatory art in history and the lessons that can be learned from it for online participation in art.
A dot on a line
One of my key sources was Nicholas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics. At the heart of Bourriaud’s thesis is the idea that art is not to be found in static objects but in lived experiences. A key example of this is the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, who in the past has presented people with large canisters of thai soup and noodles in the name of art. Here’s a quote from the book:
The contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutination*. An artwork is a dot on a line. (Bourriaud, 1998, p20-21)
*agglutination is the adhesion of distinct parts, apparently.
I haven’t blogged for ages. In fact I’ve barely blogged so far this unit. This is because I found myself having fun down the rabbit hole we call the internet. I set up an RSS reader for the first time and have been reading design blogs and other interesting things. So, I have things to write about.
I think we still don’t really understand what the internet is. It’s seen almost as a magazine or newspaper. The design of most web pages doesn’t really take in to account the changing sense of space online. The information visualisation potential of a web page moving from one state to another is incredible. I’m often slightly bemused by the fact that this isn’t explored further. I guess these things take time, money, research and are a nightmare to bring into standards compliance.
