Symmetry is boring and to prove it I took a video of an online face symmetry test using two photos of myself. Symmetry is a marker of beauty — the more symmetrical your face the more beautiful you are. The photos I analyzed are an ID photo and the other a photo of my friends and I. I’d rather be happy and asymmetric than boring and pretty.
thoughts on: new conventions of display that alter the conditions for viewing art
maybe it has something to do with how we learn about art, through representations of art. we subconsciously assume that our works will be remembered by their documentation, rarely the actual work itself.
the museum also opens itself to new forms of public interpretation. This is a true form of institutional vulnerability.
there is a thrill in the fact that what you see online exists in real life. the web as an alternative *option* is what makes it so exciting and widely accepted.
this can also be seen as a transition phase we are moving out of, as it is hard to maintain both ‘platforms’, probably for many reasons.
“…Doing so means posting our works on the world wide web so that anyone, anywhere, at any
time can have access to them. In this way, we will ensure that our work exists.”
If a tree falls in the woods and no one sees it does it make a noise? If no one reads/see your
academic or professional work (and arguably your personal work, your artistic work) does it
exist? Can things exist inside a vacuum? If knowledge or ideas are not shared, that is unable to
be passed from one person to another and carried on to further social circles, cultural circles,
economic circles, etc., do those ideas die? Does an idea have to be shared in order to have a
life; must it be shared on the internet?
“UbuWeb embraces the distributive possibilities inherent in the web’s original technologies: call
it radical forms of distribution.”
What is the purpose of the internet; is it still to be a radical platform to share information or has it
mutated and become more commercially driven (broadband, access, cost, government control
vs. control in the hand of people vs. control in the hands of corporations are all things one
should consider when answering)?
“But we are in a unique position — I’d call it a privileged position — to be able to give our work
away, ensuring that it exists.”
“Can you imagine taking a laptop to the beach to read an e-book? Not yet. But it will happen. So
for the time being, our books need to have an online counterpart which extends, updates or in
some way acts as a corollary agent to the paper edition.”
This paper was published in 2005, ten years ago. One needs to consider if the points it makes
are still as relevant today as they were ten years ago because people do take e-readers to the
beach now. What has changed in the online climate since Goldsmith published this paper? In
what ways has [academic] information become more available to the public because of the
internet. Has it? (Google books) Or is it become closer to the Barnes and Noble example
Goldsmith gives, that what is available is narrow, or the online purchasing examples, only
available to those who can shell out for it?
“But almost everyone has access to the web (and if not now, they soon will). From this stems
numerous opportunities.”
Is this true or the position of someone who lives in a privileged position who has nearly unlimited
internet access?
“Older media needs to be digitized in order to exist.”
How does the reemergence and popularity of analog products like records or instant film fit into
this idea? Goldsmith addresses vinyl records specifically but the climate ten years ago
regarding the subject is different. The Impossible Project, which was successful was the
initiative to start producing Polaroid film again after production ceased. Nowadays when you
walk into any Urban Outfitters you can purchase a pack of Polaroid film, a distinctly analog
product that does not exist online. However the roots of The Impossible Project are online. I
remember signing a petition to show my support for the project in high school. The support and
success of the project probably would not have been possible without the internets ability to
make the project accessible to millions of people; much more than the bubble of photographers
and enthusiasts who originally started the endeavor. Or take fujifilm instax cameras and film,
another instant but different film project. I work at a summer camp and two years ago I was the
only person who knew of or owned such a camera. Last year it was myself and one 14 year old
girl. This summer, in 2015, several campers, ages ranging between 13-18 owned such cameras
and utilized them daily. And it can be argued that girls that age have real buying and market
power (think of the wild success of things girls that age support — Twilight, The Hunger Games,
etc.,) so it’s not a niche group, as I was in 2013 with my fujifilm camera as a photographer who
lived primarily in New York City. These analog products are having a moment again and for so
many people they do exist, they are real. They are real and live in conjunction with their digital
counterparts. Instagram posts of polaroid pictures are seen everywhere. Records are now sold
with coupons for digital copies. Is this the future of analog and digital, a world where the two can
coexist simultaneously, each with their merits and short comings, in a symbiotic relationship?
All quotations come from Kenneth Goldsmith’s online article “If It Doesn’t Exist On The Internet, It Doesn’t Exist”
I’m a reformed music snob
Here’s an excerpt from a paper I wrote about Snapchat, where I site this week’s reading.
(I took the citations out but I think it’s still pretty clear what is quoted)
Late senator Ted Stevens went down in history after referring to the Internet as a “series of tubes”. If it is rendered utterly impossible to view the entire object, it becomes theoretically, and literally, harder to grasp. Back to poor, misinformed Senator Stevens. You can almost start to see where he is coming from. For a while the technology industry depended heavily on the advancement of physical hardware – CPUs, monitors, keyboards, mice, TV screens, laptops and phones all rely on a great deal of physical sophistication to function properly. Even appliances and gadgets that are fit solely for a single purpose require this kind of consideration. So why wouldn’t the inside of these objects work in a similar way? This assumption is not entirely wrong nor is it horribly uncommon. In contrast to hardware however, software indicates that something’s value no longer depends on the measure of its physicality. Google, one of the world’s seven largest cloud storage companies, has recently compared itself to a bank. Luckily, there is enough discrepancy in this metaphor to keep it from becoming a total reality. Yet it still holds true in the sense that cloud storage companies do, like banks, rely wholly on trust. This lack of physicality can be “seen” in how much of the Internet relies on Wi-fi, which is still quantifiable in the sense that you must pay for it, but requires no physical apparatus for it to work. Post-Internet artist and theorist Artie Vierkant responds to this collapse of physical space by introducing the idea of expanding digital files to take on physical forms, or “image-objects”. Sure, all of this theory made for a fascinating press release in whatever gallery space Artie ended up showing in, but its relevance continues in how we approach designing for the future or, in other words, “moving from existing to preferred situations”.
I have been intrigued generally about how people have hypothesized the internet to grow into in the past. In recent years the internet has taken over print, I believe that build your own story would be a brilliant idea for literature to take over the internet. It reminded me alot of the Goosebumps books so I decided to merge that typeface with the worlds largest create your own adventure–Google!
I found this article very interesting because recently I have been thinking a lot about how we experience moving through spaces. I think the legitimacy of the interaction is often placed below the interest founded in moving through time. However I believe that our ability to move through space is infinitely more interesting than moving through time would ever be. Because we already move through time at the pace we are at it is only the speed that would change. Just the idea of there being depth in spaces is amazing. That we can move forward and back through spaces that we create is incredibly interesting. The three diminutional then being interrupted into the two dimensional is a tough task. Certain nuances are bound to be lost. The feeling of the ground beneath your feat and the brush of the air around you is gone however the most interesting aspect, the experience of depth is achieved.
I decided to try to create depth using boxes. As you click through the colors rotate to simulate depth.
I read Pleasurable design and agree with it entirely. As an industrial designer in our current global state of affairs it is extremely important to be away of what we are producing. If we produce a dangerous car we are murderers. We walk a very thin line as creates, with the constant possibility that we may do something wrong or that someone may be inspired by us to do something wrong. We play many roles as creator, we can be an entertainer, a stylist, a helping hand, a shelter and countless more. One of the most important facets of design to keep in mind is pleasure. There is never anything wrong in pure pleasure, it is never something we have to fear. I was inspired by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and decided to make a website inspired by their designs.
I set all the vectors i created off of their work to transparencies and percentages so that they would overlap in different ways when you expanded the page.
I hate the social construction of taste. By collecting records, drinking dark coffee and having an iPhone all of a sudden you have more cultural currency than someone who listens to One Direction, drinks Sunny D and has a flip phone. These ideas we link to our level of education and therefore our wealth and intelligence. With the rise of fast fashion and more easily accessible forms of cultural currency there has been a need to divide what is good and what is bad in order to other, to bring ourselves up higher in the hierarchy and push everyone else down as we go. To respond to this article I coded a ridiculous list of people to avoid
people to avoid
This article spoke to me in terms of making active choices as a designer. Playing it safe, making everything exactly the same is undeniably clean however also deathly boring. Not only do you have to break the rules you have to do so with purpose. I made a gif saying “symmetry is boring” because it is. I stayed away from my normal color palette and tried something brighter using shapes I wouldn’t usually choose to use. I had fun.
