PROJECT 1: PLACE AS PORTRAIT

for the first project, we were asked to visit the fitzroy gardens and make a video work that serves as a portrait of that place. when we did this project i had just moved to this city barely a month prior, so i was coming at the location from a bit of a different angle, i feel. i wasn't aware of any of the location's history, nor did i have any memories attached to it at all. i didn't feel like i would have anything particularly valuable to contribute if i TRIED to talk about the contentious history of the gardens. so, what value could i bring? what did i have to say about this place? how did it make me feel? well, i thought it was pretty but noisy. kind of (surprise) how i felt about this city after moving here. theoretically nice, but in practice, overwhelming and overstimulating. i was staying in student accommodation right in the middle of the city which was a very big change from living in a quiet suburb in a completely different state. so i decided to make a work kind of about my homesickness, about how this city didn't feel like a home yet, how nothing felt quite "right". too loud! too different! ahh!

so, to do that, i basically just filmed a bunch of different places that i found to be very pretty. sunlight pouring through yellow leaves (see RIGHT above this), a dead tree's branches rustling in the wind. all very nature-focused, maybe because i was missing the vibrant lush trees that surrounded my childhood home. i also recorded a bunch of noises on the opposite end of the spectrum - cars passing by the park, pedestrian crossing beeping, trams rattling, the roar of the train coming into the nearby station, crowds clamouring and yelling. the plan was to overlay all these noises over each other, create an incredibly noisy and overstimulating noise to contrast the more gentle, peaceful visuals. i didn't end up doing that!

instead, i decided to mess around with this cool program i had heard about called touchdesigner. this turned out to be quite the undertaking, and there's a reason i never returned to this program this semester. well, a couple reasons. it's completely different from anything i've ever really touched - it's kind of similar to blender as it's node-based, which i'm sort of familiar with, but it's a lot more rooted in programming, and that is not yet a skill of mine. plus the free version doesn't let you do too much. i'd like to come back to it though, it's a cool program that you can do so much cool stuff with. but that is unrelated.

i tried out touchdesigner because i knew of its capacity to make some cool glitchy, weird, messed up work. that's an aesthetic that i'm interested in, but don't have an overwhelming amount of experience with. it's more that a lot of the artists online i follow make that kind of work, like zoe wolfe (i specifically find her work using a gameboy camera to be SO cool). there's something transgender about the glitch. maybe i'll expand on that thought at some other point in this degree. my intention was to distort the footage almost beyond recognition. i wanted noise and strange colours and visible pixels. this is that feeling of things not being quite "right", to me. it conjures a memory of a computer breaking, but not so wholly that it's unusable. you can still make sense of it, but... barely. so i watched a bunch of youtube tutorials and mushed a couple different node setups together, things i thought could maybe help with this look. the result is, well, a little beyond my complete understanding, to be honest. following tutorials in software you barely understand with the most unfamiliar complicated UI imaginable often means you don't quite know what each step is actually accomplishing. i didn't super like this, there was a lack of agency and control. but we had a quick turnaround so i had to work with it.

that's the node setup up there. to explain it simply (because that's about as much of it i can grasp), this setup creates several layers of the same footage and overlays them over each other. each of these layers does something weird and different. there's a layer that runs the clip through a colour ramp, converting it to a vibrant, rainbow palette. there's another layer that grabs the "edges" of the image, as in it finds significant differences in pixels and puts a line wherever those differences are, like drawing an outline of it. there's another layer (my favourite one), that uses something called a blob tracker. kind of similar to the edge-detecting layer, it finds areas that are similar and tracks them as they move, drawing a weird little box around them that jolts and shudders around. when all of these are combined together, you get a super distorted and strange image, mostly created through elements "seen" by the computer. this ends up working thematically really well because, especially at that period of being very freshly-moved, i felt alien and weird. computers are kind of alien and weird. you get it.

that's what it ended up looking like. but imagine it flashing and moving constantly. or don't imagine, just scroll down and watch the video of the final version. but i'm not done talking about my process so don't do that :). to get it into a video format was actually kind of a nightmare. touchdesigner, in the free version, only allows you to render video at a very small resolution. so instead, i came up with the most insane person workaround i could muster - i rendered each frame of the video individually as a small photo, and then set up a batch automation thing in photoshop that took each frame, resized it to a size more suitable for video, that still maintained the pixellated look, and then used a program called shutter encoder to stitch all the photos together until it was a video again. it took forever and looking back i'm surprised i did all that in a week. maybe you can see why i put touchdesigner away for the rest of the semester. but, even with the video portion completed, i wasn't done! the work needed sound.

the sound part took signficantly less time, but that was just because it was a much simpler process. i thought how i could build upon the idea of the piece - if the video is originally calming, but distorted like crazy, if i just followed the same principles for the sound it should work well. so that's pretty much all i did - i found a calming ambient song (i'll never forget you - understatement) that holds some sentimental value for me, ran it through a plugin in audacity that crushes it up, put the audio to the video, and that was that. i had my portrait of place. and now you can have it too. just below. look. i have put the video in. wow!

i was really happy with the result and the reception when i showed it in class. someone said it was like what a computer would see if it was dying and i thought that was pretty apt. i thought this would make for a kind of cool series of works, but once i was done with it, i immediately wanted to move on to different things, so. it did teach me some good lessons about speeding up my workflow (or, rather, how bad it sucks when your workflow is painfully slow), and dipped my toes into a software i do hope to come back to again at some point. onto the next project!

PROJECT 2: MATERIALITY

materiality was a really fun project for me. another one that i would love to expand upon at some point, but who knows. the unintentional extended amount of time we got for this project was especially great because i was able to mess around and experiment a lot more before eventually arriving at my idea. really, going in, all i knew is i wanted to mess around with the glitch machines and just go from there. video synths are so awesome - there's something about the tactile nature of them that makes them very satisfying. usually if i make glitch work (like the last project!) it's entirely within software and that feels a lot less like i am physically interacting with an object. it's also rarely ACTUAL glitch, more just co-opting the aesthetic of it. i'm not really breaking anything. and with the visual synthesisers, i mean, i guess you're not really breaking anything either, but there is much more of a physical presence, both in the act of making and in the visuals it produces. so that was very exciting for me.

i really cannot emphasise enough how little of an idea i had going into this. i like that a lot actually, as i think a lot of interesting ideas can come out of the innocent state of mind of "play". i was just playing around, loading VHS tapes and fiddling with knobs until i got cool results. it was fun to mess around with, and i did record a LOT of footage of whatever the random VHS tapes were lying around class. but i did not end up using literally any of that. with time to think about the piece, i thought that as fun as it was to play around with, i wasn't producing anything that felt particularly meaningful to me. it LOOKED awesome, but it didn't really resonate with me on any sort of emotional or cerebral level. here's where my actual idea came in. well, actually THIS is where my actual idea came in. i'm pointing below. at the spinning gif right there. just picture it ok?

around when we were assigned the project, i had recently gotten an old wii from a friend of mine. the wii was the gaming console that i grew up on, but it had been years since i actually ever played it. my old wii was probably thrown out ages ago (against my will, i'm sure). but there's something about that era of gaming that is very dear to my heart. a lot of it's probably nostalgia. but i think there's something really neat about the aesthetic that the wii operates in. it's very optimistic, somehow? all bright and summery and glossy. it's also a very tactile console, more so than any other i've played. this is so off-topic - the point is, i like the wii a lot, mostly for nostalgic reasons. so acquiring one was huge for me. actually getting around to playing it, though, was a hassle. there were so many extra cables i needed - the wii didn't have hdmi output, so in order to play it on my computer monitor, i needed to purchase some sketchy adapter off amazon. and then the resolution wasn't right on my ultrawide monitor, so i had to fiddle with it some more. to get it to work at all, you have to fiddle with it a LOT. it's outdated and it's been made obsolete by constant advancements. regardless, i knew what i wanted to do. i HAD to hook it up to the glitch machine. so i did!

there's an incredibly shitty gif of me messing around with it. for proof i guess? anyways. i recorded about 30 minutes of different gameplay footage of a game called wii sports resort. which, at one point, was my favourite game of all time. it's not anymore because i am no longer 7. the minigame i found to be the most visually appealing, and coincidentally the one i have the most memories of enjoying, was the flyover game. in this game, you control a small plane which flies around wuhu island, where the game is set. it's a game with very vibrant colours, which i ended up exploiting. but as i was playing it, not just through the glitch machine but at home, too, i noticed something. it... kind of sucks? well, it doesn't suck, but it's boring, and clearly the magic isn't there like i hoped it would be. it was stronger, somehow, as a memory. here's a frame from some of the footage.

as you can see, it's pretty cool, but rather plain, i felt. so the simple solution to that was just to take other footage and overlay it over the top, experimenting with different blend modes and whatnot. it was here, in the editing stage, that i began to get a clearer sense of what this work might mean to me. this was still purportedly about materiality, about physically distorting an image almost beyond recognition. memory is, in the same way, inherently distorted. the gameplay was subjected to physical deterioration, and my memories of the game as a child have been subjected to a similar deterioration. they're barely there. so i was kind of reacting to childhood nostalgia, and the sort of strange sadness that comes from trying to rekindle that childlike joy. but the visuals, on their own, even with crazy chaotic overlays and a barely perceptible image, didn't communicate that sadness. here, again, sound came after the visuals to me, but i knew that they were very, very important in order to make this work, well, work. so i spent a lot of time on them.

every sound that ended up in the video came from the wii itself. there are some nice people online who have uploaded every single sound from wii sport resort's game files, as well as the sounds of the wii software, so i was able to download from that repository and work from there. i messed around a lot, but was really happy with where it ended up. i took synthy digital sounds and slowed them down immensely so they became swooping, building ambient tracks. as the image gets more and more distorted throughout the video, i added more and more noise, crunchier and grungier. combined, i think it was really effective. but don't take my word for it. look down there!

i've spoken pretty extensively over in the feedback and reflection section about showing this work and my thoughts on it, so i won't get too much into that. but this was definitely one of my favourite things that i made this semester, and the ideas that it sparked in me, i think, are still visible in my finalised work.

MINI PROJECT

we had to make a video and exhibit it in class in a matter of hours, all themed around different colours. our group's theme was centred on the colour of blue, and we decided to do different levels of the ocean. i was doing the upper layer of the ocean, where the sunlight still pierces the surface. with the short amount of time, i overlayed a couple clips over each other and messed with the blend modes to get some interesting surreal textures. the central piece is from the game ecco the dolphin: defender of the future, so the camera is constantly locked onto a dolphin, never really moving. i was pretty happy with it for the short amount of time we had, and i think it worked really well with the whole class's work together.

PROJECT 3: COLOUR

i had a weird, irrational fear of getting locked into one very particular aesthetic this early in the degree, so i tried to make something completely different for this project. and in some ways i was forced to, as this was a very different sort of work - it was collaborative, the soundtrack was prescribed, and i had to base it all off of one colour: night sky. in my spare time, i had been messing around with some digital collage stuff, with images sourced from archived illustrations. i thought animating something in this sort of style could be cool.

i came up with a small little narrative that, to me, suited the music and the premise of "night sky", scoured an archive for illustrations that might work, collaged them together in photoshop, and edited the work together. i think we had a fairly short turnaround for this project too, so i didn't make anything too crazy. but i'm still relatively happy with what i made! i just think it has a little less value to me because it wasn't motivated by any idea that really resonated with me personally. they can't all be winners! but here is my section of the video, which was right at the end.

it definitely worked a little stronger in the context of the whole video, but it's still not the best thing i've made, for sure. that's okay though because now it was time to move onto the self-directed project, for which i had a few ideas kicking around that built off of the ideas that interested me earlier in the semester, and art i'd been enjoying.

SELF-DIRECTED PROJECT

this is the big one! after spending some time browsing old geocities archives, i had the idea to make works about the interesting strangers posting on there over two decades ago. there were a couple key things that inspired me to make what i ended up making, and i thought it would probably be pertinent to talk about these here. to hit that "Identify artistic cultural influences in your work" criteria.

the first one is a game called hypnospace outlaw, a 90s internet simulator from 2019. i think i draw a lot of inspiration from video games, maybe more so than other forms of art. hypnospace is a fantastic game with a lot of charm, both visually and in its writing. in it, ostensibly, you are a content moderator on the platform of "hypnospace", an internet browser that you play in your sleep. i say ostensibly because while content moderation is your objective in the game, it's not really the selling point. finding content that is harassment, or malicious software, or illegal activity, is really just a motivating force to get you to browse the fake internet that's set up for you. the real pleasure comes from reading all these pages from different characters, all with very different interests and personalities and webpage design. it's very heavily inspired by geocities and the types of users you might have seen there, but i think it has a lot of merit on its own too. the art design is incredibly charming, and the game creator has actually posted a couple tutorials talking about how he makes images and gifs have that crunchy, old-web feel that's a little exaggerated to fit this hyper-stylised version (that i end up using!). but hypnospace outlaw kicked off an interest in me in browsing old geocities archives. which brings me to my next point of inspiration.

geocities itself is obviously the biggest thing that had an influence on my work. it was a free web hosting service that lasted from 1994 until 2009. its shutdown means that the only way to access any of the 38 MILLION pages that once existed on the site today is to hope they've been archived and look through the wayback machine. many of them weren't archived at all, and i genuinely think this is such a tragic loss. geocities has a lot of charm and i think a great deal of that comes out of the era and the fact that it was completely free. anyone with a computer and access to the internet could make a page, which means you had a really diverse array of people posting about a diverse array of topics. it was also popular in the pre-social media, pre-algorithm era, so it has a great sense of innocence to me. plus a lot of the people on there are very eccentric in a very pleasant way. i love geocities! and the fact that so much of it is forever lost today - and, maybe all of it could be lost someday, if you look at what's happening to the internet archive - is so, so sad to me. i guess i wanted to make this work to mourn this loss, to memorialise some of its users, and to celebrate an era of the internet that i wasn't quite old enough to experience. it's motivated, therefore, also out of an all-consuming hatred for the way the internet operates today. the internet is so garbage, bloated with AI trash, a hotbed for misinformation, riddled with insidious advertising and all controlled by the most evil corporations in existence. it seems like every day an invaluable resource, or just a lovely little website that means a lot to good people, gets shafted by tech companies and the world marching downwards. i will end my rant there but i think it is important to recognise that, to me at least, my self-directed project is in some ways political. the internet should never have become the capitalist hellscape it is today, or maybe it always was a capitalist hellscape, and i'm just mourning a version of the internet that could never really exist. anyways.

on a similar note, a great resource and work i found that was very helpful and inspirational for my self-directed project, was 'one terabyte of kilobyte age' by olia lialina and dragan espenschied. it's a tumblr archive that aims to preserve websites from geocities. these artists, before geocities was shut down in 2009, downloaded almost a terabyte of pages, and now very consistently share these pages with the world. it's really important work and i love it so much. they also operate a blog, another resource that i turn to a lot when it comes to figuring out what exactly made geocities so special. it contains a lot of interviews from people knowledgeable about geocities, as well as links to great resources about geocities and just some writing on geocities. some highlights i found were this page called 'the geocities-izer', in which you can paste a link to a website and see how it might look as a geocities page, or a site that hosted pivot, a stickman animation software that i actually remember playing around with a lot as a kid. i would just make the stickmen fight in the most janky terrible animations ever. i would have been like 5 or 6 when i was using it, which, looking back, is a little crazy. not just that i was given pretty unmoderated internet access at such a young age, but that, even then, i liked making shitty animations and playing with weird niche software. that's another point of inspiration for this work. i said i wasn't quite old enough to experience geocities, and that's not completely true. i was on the internet from a really really young age, teaching myself computer literacy, talking to complete strangers, posting to forums and youtube. i definitely should not have been given such unrestricted access, but it was absolutely formative for me. i almost definitely was on geocities as a lot of websites hosted their content there, and i was browsing as early as 2007. but those faint memories of the early internet, of crappy edutainment flash games, of clunky webpages and software i had to teach myself how to use, are very special to me and probably some form of a nostalgic motivator for me, much like project 2.

i would say the final very significant point of reference for me is the video game lsd: dream emulator. it's a cult classic playstation game from 1998 with such a stark, surreal and unique visual style, inspired by the creator's dream diary. the "playstation graphics" look is making a comeback both in gaming and in internet trends. almost to the point that i'd be annoyed by it because so many people implement it really poorly. it's a look formed out of limitations. the original playstation was not very powerful, meaning objects rendered in it could have a limited number of vertices and the texture files they pulled from were very low resolution. and still, the artists working on those games managed to work within those limitations, or rather make the limitations work FOR them. you only need to go back and look at games like the original silent hill or the first spyro the dragon game to see that very unique and distinct looks emerged out of these limitations. lsd: dream emulator is one of the most stunning examples, for me, and i've been very inspired by it whenever i've worked in this sort of style before. it was something i had yet to revisit this semester, but i had an itching for it. luckily, i felt it worked really well for this next project idea, as its temporally located in the same period as geocities, but also the surreal, vibrant, dreamy look i think really suits the idea of a distorted memory. so, with all of those inspirations buzzing around in my head throughout the semester, and this vague idea of making memorials dedicated to random geocities users, the next step was to start MAKING it.

that's a lie that's a complete lie i'm sorry. the next step was actually to make a mood reel about it. a proof of concept of my ideas. here's a video i slapped together in a matter of hours in class which i think did a pretty good job of conveying the "vibes" of the work, even if it's a little bit of a mess. it uses elements from lsd: dream emulator gameplay and geocities websites kind of just overlayed over the top of each other, and an old car seat headrest song from when he was making stuff alone and on a terrible laptop mic, because i think it has that sort of amateur but charming feel to it.

NOW it was time to start making it. i knew i wanted to make a series of works based on a couple different users - in my mind at the beginning i had 4. this did not work out and was over ambitious. but i decided to just focus my efforts on one person so i could have it done and ready to show the class in the second group tute. that user i decided to focus on was the one i found the most interesting and endearing - poetrywizard4life. i stumbled across his page while looking through gifcities, a website that collects a bunch of gifs users had on their pages back on geocities. when you click on the gifs it links you to their page. i found this really tacky 9/11 memorial gif with doves and lovehearts, just really cheesy and cliche. and it brought me to the page of chad.

chad was a very dorky but sincere guy, with constant references to his poetry and his desire to find love scattered across his page. i found it very sweet and also very funny. there were pictures of BADASS wolves and his work was copyrighted under the name "howling at the moon". in my mind at this point i was thinking maybe this would be a simple video work, or a series of them with a video dedicated to each of the users. so i first started work on the video portion. i was inspired heavily by lsd: dream emulator and my previous experience with the 3d animation software blender, so i got to work creating a simple scene that i felt matched his vibe. technicolour highway through the american south, passing big billboards. i started with the textures, which were all very low res. first i grabbed a photo of chad's face, and manipulated it a bit in photoshop to get this:

which quickly became this:

compositing the scene was relatively simple because i've played around with this sort of look before. i just made a texture for the road, built some very simple billboards out of rectangular prisms, some mountains in the background, set up a virtual camera, and then i had this:

i textured the "screen" portion of the billboards as a bright green so i could easily chroma key it out in premiere. i then made two separate video files to go within those locations. one was text taken directly from poetrywizard4life's website, with an AI-generated voice reading out his writing. i decided to go for an AI voice because to me it sounds a little stilted and janky, and it's also an imperfect recreation of chad. his voice was obviously never "archived" like the rest of his website's content, so i had to fill in the blanks imperfectly. i thought to present the text in a way that's reminiscient of those early youtube lyric videos. i tried messing around with the windows xp version of movie maker, even setting up a virtual machine with xp on it so i could do it the most authentically, but it ended up being a real hassle, so i just sort of recreated it in premiere pro. much simpler. the other portion of the video was a slideshow of images of chad. almost none of these images came from his geocities website directly, but they were very easy to find with some simple googling. i found his facebook page and trawled through his photo gallery to the very beginning, where he posted these dorky, awkward selfies of himself constantly. it felt kind of like an invasion of his privacy to do this, but also not, because it was all publicly available and not very hidden at all. and then with the two of these elements superimposed into the rendered scene, i needed some music. music was difficult to settle on. i knew i wanted to use MIDI files, because geocities often had MIDI files playing on them. in fact if you visit archived geocities pages, it often automatically downloads a MIDI file for you rather than playing it as you browse. i ended up finding chad's youtube, going through a country playlist he made, and found a song that someone had turned into a MIDI file. i think MIDI files just as they are sound great. very clunky and awkward, but charming in that way. soon, the first video was done!

there was, however, still the matter of choosing how to display it. it didn't feel quite right as a simple single channel video. and i'd been working on this site (the one you're on right now!) for a while, trying to make it reminiscent of the era of the internet that i'm inspired by. turns out it would be a perfect way to display the work itself, and i had already done all the coding work. so i then got to work on making a fake desktop for poetrywizard4life, inspired by these exaggerated versions of the aesthetics i gleaned from his page and used in the video. i took the AWESOME wolf image he had on his website, altered the colours like crazy in photoshop, then lowered the resolution and indexed the colours to a smaller colour palette. this was a technique i used a lot in this work, including in the slideshow of chad's face. colours of images were often indexed for the web, with the palette reduced to 256 colours, but i pushed it and exaggerated it further to reduce the palette even more, just to enhance the effect. i ended up with this background which i thought was quite nice.

then it was just a matter of coming up with some other content to be visible on the desktop. i knew i wanted all the text to be derived straight from the users themselves, and luckily chad has a lot of writing across his old geocities, his flickr, and his facebook account, so there was a lot to choose from. i took an about from his flickr page and a weird clickbaity misinformative warning about the danger of onions(???) from very early on in his facebook. the facebook thing might seem quite different from the spirit of this piece, but i think it works. it sort of signals the start of the downfall of the internet, and he posted it in the early 2000s so it works for me. and then i just gathered a collection of gifs found from gifcities all mourning 9/11 (as chad would have wanted), over-saturated the colours like nuts, and there! it was time to show it to the class.

since it's an interactive work, i thought it would make the most sense for the whole class to be able to interact with it themselves. so i logged in to every single computer in the computer lab and let everyone play around with it. i was very happy with how it was received, and got some useful insights and advice moving forward. there were some changes i needed to make as i moved forward - chad talks nonstop about his poetry, but i didn't actually have any poetry available on his website. that was because, as much as i tried, his poetry isn't accessible anywhere on the internet. it, unlike his geocities page, was not archived! but this is quite relevant to the themes of the work, so i added a little page that links to his poetry, but actually just ends up linking to a dead page remarking that this page was never archived. i also needed a short little prologue to the work, to give just a small amount of context so the viewer could understand that these users were real, these words were written by them, but their pages are difficult to access or stumble across today so i have made the work in an attempt to memorialise their presence on the internet. more on the "prologue" later. next i had to start working on the next user, who would end up being the only user, because i really didn't have much time. it's a shame, i think the work could have been cooler with even just one more user, but it is what it is. who is the user i decided to add, though?

that's steve g / longhaireddude, of course. similarly to chad, i found steve just by looking through gifcities. he was even more of a prolific poster than chad, and a lot more of his content was archived, thankfully. i also found steve very endearing and sweet. he's got an obsession with long hair, both his own, and the long hair of an imagined prospective partner. it was the sentences, "the hair is not the man, a may one day lose his hair, but his spirit will always be with him. it is the spirit within the man that compelled him to grow his hair long and to have the courage to endurethe wrath of the conformists..." that made me know i had to include him in this work. i find steve to be much sadder than chad to me, maybe because he's a queer man and i can empathise more with his struggle. he, like chad, really, really wanted to find a partner. but unlike chad, he had this hopelessness about it. he had incredibly high standards, but was conscious of those high standards, and seemed resigned to the fact that he would never actually find someone. also unlike chad, i was never able to find any of his internet presence online today. and that makes me so sad because i will never know if he ended up finding a kewl dude with long hair. i really hope he did. but that's beside the point! the process of making a page for steve was very similar to the process of making one for chad, albeit a bit more streamlined because i had learned from the previous process and knew what i wanted and how to achieve it fast. i wanted his page to be a contrast to chad's. a different colour palette entirely, but still rooted in the surreal, exaggerated aesthetic i had established earlier. he's from florida and talks about how much he likes the beach and swimming, so i decided to make his scene based around this idea. pretty soon i ended up with this:

i was really happy with this one. i thought it was kind of almost too much of an improvement over the composition of the chad scene, but that's okay. again, the textures are often made up of images of his face, much like the textures in lsd: dream emulator depicting a lot of human faces in contrast to their dreamlike environments. i struggled to think of an element where videos could be put in in a beach scene, so i settled for these strange floating cubes. i actually like them a lot though. this time i didn't even key them out, i went by hand and made the pixels transparent, to ensure that the palm trees could just partially block the view. and then, much like chad's, i generated an AI voice for steve, whipped up a little slideshow of pictures of him and of his writing, slapped a song over it, and then the video was done! the other elements came together similarly easily, maybe even easier, because steve just has so much writing out there.

a final touch i made to steve's desktop was inspired by his pages. as geocities was shutting down, steve mentions that he's moving to his own new custom site. that site, unfortunately, is not still active. but there are a bunch of archived versions of it, and the late ones are cluttered with junk ads, listing the domain for sale. that's so sad to me. it's almost like a digital corpse. so i made a similarly obtrusive, illegible, and ad-cluttered page, under the heading of "new site". it is covered in almost unreadable white text that is all from spam emails i found (actually in eva and franco mattes' life sharing work, that was a great resource for spam emails of the era), all sort of mushed and jammed together to make a nonsensical string of sexually explicit and fraudulent text. i was really happy with it. but man, i really hope steve is doing well - i actually can't stop thinking about it even after the work has been finished. but here's what that ad page ended up looking like.

with the two desktops completed, i had to make a quick little prologue to the work! i wanted it to be short and sparse, just providing the needed context. i wrote up a couple of different versions of it, some really dramatic and serious, talking about "ghosts in the computer", but i ended up thinking this actually detracted from the work. while there is this big sense of sadness about the work, for this bygone era of the internet, for this innocent era in these complete strangers' lives, how the loss of millions of geocities pages was such a tragic loss of such a huge amount of information - i thought that sadness is best communicated in the actual work itself, and the prologue was never meant to BE the work itself. it's a prologue, just setting you up for it, equivalent to walking into an exhibition with a little plaque that gives you some information before you actually view it. so i made it simple, but still communicating my feelings about the work - that the internet sucks, but i'd like to imagine that maybe one day it didn't. i put big huge breaks between the text so the viewer would have to do a decent amount of scrolling. it's the equivalent, for me, to walking into a space. you're just scrolling there. and then it asks you to choose between THE WOLF and THE LION. it's all a little tacky, but i think the work is relatively informal and tacky so i'm of the opinion that it works pretty well. (and i like my dumb lion joke because steve certainly loves his mane!)

and then... that was it. i finished my project! it's been a very interesting and fun semester for me, and i'm very excited to keep going in the course and develop my work further and make things that i'm even happier with. i want to push myself conceptually more and also get better at time management so i can make my works as big and great as they are in my mind. but all in all i'm proud of what i was able to achieve in this relatively short amount of time. thank you for reading this and thank you for teaching me throughout this semester, it's been very fun. :-]]]]