Updates

Just some updates,

I have since finishing making my pilot designed what I want the final project to look like, in which all the elements in the pilot are linked together as a cohesive whole, in which the user can literally scroll through that month of my life. This gives a more interactive feel to the project than it is currently. (Click on the images to see the larger version)

Updates

Geo-tagging flikr photos on a Map

I have managed to find a application that links to the photo geo-tagging app on Flikr through an Iframe, which allows you to tag a photo to a particular location on a map (google maps).

http://mapaset.4bcj.com/getmapmyset.aspx?sid=72157625323618832&suggest=true

The data updates automatically, so when I update the geo-tag map on flikr, it automatically updates the map on my page, with the photos and the location of where it is. (this can be seen on the prototype)


Blog-Loc

Also, I have implemented an application called blog-loc which allows you to update your location via GPS signal , thus mapping you on google maps (this can also be seen on my prototype)

http://breakmyfall.0sites.net/MyDataFlow/index.html

Project Proposal

Project Proposal: ‘MyDataFlows’

I am going to be making a ‘sousveillance’/ self-surveillance websites that invite the gaze in, in which I subject myself for a month towards using different social networking tools and attempting to show aspects of myself in the public gaze. This is in a sense a social networking media project in which through my use of those technologies available on the web I promote the idea that these social networking tools encourage transparency, whereby the private becomes part of the public. The point of this project is to show how my physical-digital lifestyle can be projected onto the internet, in which my use of these social networking tools, as well as GPS location tools create new systems in which we self-govern our own identity. We are no longer in a situation where the CCTV camera track you, but rather how we use self-surveillance tools to track ourselves and how we govern ourselves through those technologies. In a similar fashion to Hasan Elahi I hope to show how by re-appropriating different social networking tools (Twitter, Flikr and Facebook), as well as tools freely available on the internet  that utilize things like google maps (like blogloc) are all forms of self-surveillance.  But more than this epitomises this change to controll societies whereby we now live in a transparent society, being encouraged to share our lives and sense of identity on the internet.

I will combine all the following elements:

1. ·         Status Updates from Twitter
2. ·         Images from my Flikr Account
3. ·         A GPS Signal Map
4. ·         An Image Track (displaying all the places I have been)
5. ·         Facebook updates (I have not found a way to implement this yet)

These will all be combined into a website to show how these new technologies create new conditions in which we subject ourselves to external gazing, by uploading our thoughts, our location and our images onto the web. For that month you will be able to track me, watch me and see my thoughts.

I have built an initial prototype showing how I have used RSS feeds and different plug-ins to link to my external social networking sites as well as my own GPS location. This is an experiment in which I show how by using these different tools I invite the gaze in, tracking me, watching what I do, and what I am thinking at any point in time ; you have access to my inner thoughts, images and GPS location. Although I imagine the final website being more of a fractured, multi-layered website, but this still illustrates how I will grab data from all of these social networking sites. (see Interface diagrams)

The title ‘MyDataFlows’ is used to illustrate how flows of your data are projected and uploaded onto the internet and can be used to create a complete picture of my life, a transparent 'gateway' into how I use these different technolgies.

Through these tools I hope to show how we have moved from a disciplinary society where we are conditioned by our environment (the nursery, the school, the barracks, the university) by top-down surveillance, towards a situation whereby control mechanisms are transformed into consumer products (such as Twitter and Flikr, and even BlogLoc) whereby we subject ourselves to external gazing and illustrate how we have moves towards a transparent society. All in, I hope through the act of participating with these new technologies I show how the nature of information sharing has changed whereby we live in a participatory culture where we subject ourselves to external gazing.

Interface diagrams to follow....

Experimenting with Plugins

I am experimenting with plug-ins. For example I have used blogloc javascript plugin to update directly to my blog, a dynamic tracker which updates your location either by the web or through your phone.

This was fairly easily done the website automatically generates the code, and you can edit the dimensions, therefore potentially this map could cover the whole screen:

http://breakmyfall.0sites.net/MyDataFlow/index.html

My Data Fragments

In a similiar style to jody zollen offer a fragmented narrative as the user clicks on one of these images, delving into my fragmented identity on the internet, the user constantly trying to make sense of those images.

Link to my website: http://breakmyfall.0sites.net/MyDataFlow/index.html

Website Analysis: the inviting in of the gaze

I am kind of envisioning the project, as, a sort of 'personal' social networking site (I like the name mydataflows or something), with elements of all these social network sites integrated, projecting photos I have taken, status updates, profile picture changes, check-in software. I think to keep it manageable it may be over a certain period of time that this 'physical-digital' social network will go on for, in which I make use of these different elements. 

A new turn

Taking a new approach to the project, instead of making it structured like an interface, taking a more abstract and transparent approach to the project in how data about yourself becomes part of a flow of data on the internet/cyberspace.

However in terms of the project, I am a cross-road do I look at contemporary forms and look at the flows of data that, the different way I project myself on the internet? And visualize this as a novel of my life on the internet, in which flows of images, narratives, status updates become jumbled up flowing towards the user, in which the individual user can point at a piece of flowing data (and stop the flow) and look at where this is sourced from and at what time. 

But visually this flowing of data illustrates to the user that this information become in-grained into a system, whether you ask for it or not such as in Twitter, Facebook, Flikr and so on.

Almost creating a narrative flow of the various ways I can project myself, and how this creates a picture of myself.

This information becomes projected towards the user inviting the gaze in towards all these fragments of information that make up my life. We are no longer in a situation where we are watched from above, but literally this flow of data is created by our consumption of these mediums such as Facebook and Twitter, Flickr and so on. And other users have no choice but to look at this data.

In this way I was thinking of creating a website called MyDataFlows

In which essentially you have a frame in which flows of images, text and other data (in chronological order, as they have been uploaded are displayed to the user). The user can click on the information to see when this particular information was uploaded. Essentially a long strip of data flowing across the screen, the user is presented to it whether they like it or not. This will be collected from my status feed, how I am feeling modes, twitter feeds, photo feeds and so on – in order to create this narrative.

Perhaps set up with data flowing across the screen (left to right) with data, images status updates overlayed over each other, corresponding to the time, in which the user can click, or hover over their mouse to see where the data is from.

The flows of data can be jumbled, or sourced corresponding to where they have been collected from.

Or for example a record, a narrative of the places I’ve been or the things I have said on Twitter or social networking sites – they in a sense make up a narrative of what I’ve been doing, what I have said and where I have been

The main problem is how I would source this data, would it be manually put in by me, or sourced automatically from these different websites.

Mapping the digital identity

Structure

This is just a portion of what the possible structure of the website where the user can move from node to node, looking at how the person's life is codified, ultimately, to see how the technology creates a network of the virtual self, a data double or what Mark poster calls 'data identities', David Lyon sums it up:

Lyon: 'The more 'postmodern' versions of surveillance theory, as Staples says, underscore technology-based, body objectifying, everyday, universal kinds of surveillance. To review these: the technolgies make surveillance emnable to automation and place increasing reliance upon the data-double or the virtual self. [...] As new sorts of surveillance seep into all life-spheres, some engage in self surveillance of quite precise and systematic kinds. Think of keep-fit fanatics, for instance, who constantly check times, pressures weights and trates, or of the ways which some women use scales, body-fat indicators and colorie charts in forms of low-level self-surveillance (Bordo 1993)

Link: Surveillance Studies: an Overview

I was thinking another node would link to consumption/purchases, on-line receipts and other data would suggest more things for the user to purchase based on those purchases.

Another node may lead to all the chat conversation the user has had with work colleagues, illustrating how social interaction has become codified into data.

Or a link to a work profile and personal profile: 'An individual may choose to use more than one projected digital persona. People may present themselves differently to different individuals or groups on the net; or at different times to the same people; or at the same time to the same people. One projection may reflect and provide close insight into the person's 'real personality', while other personae may exaggerate aspects of the person, add features, omit features, or misrepresent the personality entirely.'

Link: http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/DigPersona.html

Or even the users travel history, a globe where the user can see through travel reciepts where the subject has been.

Or even a mood node in which how a user projects how they are feeling on the internet.

Ultimately, what both requesting and requiring personal information highlight is the centrality of producing, updating, and deploying consumer profiles…. And although Foucault warns of the self-disciplinary model of punishment in panoptic surveillance, computer profiling, conversely, oscillates between seemingly rewarding participation and punishing attempts to elect not to divulge personal information. (Elmer, 2004, pp. 5-6)

Source: http://michaelzimmer.org/files/Zimmer%20Aalborg%20talk.pdf

Foursquare

Check in service (a type of a locative media) that people can use to find their friends, but also by adding new places contribute to the mapping of a particular place, thus through their own consumption of this technology add to the service.

Surveillance to Dataveillance

Source: http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/bsalmond/0607/bms-201-assign%204

A quote that encapsulates the project...

 In the place of the internalisation of an external gaze that characterised disciplinary societies, we see the emergence of a complex of control and communication that is no longer externalised in a central command but rather operates on a social and psychological level. Such a shift has been identified in a number of contributions to ZKM's CTRL[SPACE] catalogue: whereas Orwell's 1984 expressed and embodied a fear of the future as a place in which all people and all things would be observed at all times, we now live in a present, it is claimed, characterised by "scopophilia", a mix of voyeurism and exhibitionism, and an ontological need to be observed. While this perspective may have its limits beyond the still-exceptional cases of web-cams and reality TV, with the everyday use of consumer devices such as mobile phones surveillance is being dispersed and also transformed, a technical capacity to locate becoming a tool to help us consume better and a new form of entertainment (CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ZKM, Karlsruhe/The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002).
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A long quote but very interesting in relation to the project, especially when as suggested this move from a disciplinary society, has changed from external gazing (for example a security camera, or control conditions in a certain environment) towards the ontological need to be observed in contemporary culture,  whereby we invite self-surveillance, rather than it being forced on us -- through consumption and pleasure

Prototype of Human Interface

The user will be presented with a INTERFACE to begin with, access to the technolgies that interact with this users life, but in doing so will see how technology has created a situation of self surveillance through consumption of technologies with GPS, but also through the array of ways in which this user is governed through an array of mediums using particular control mechanisms.

Mainframe:

#

GPS: For example when the user clicks on GPS will be presented with when the subject has signed in using a locative media service:

Contacts: It is however not only through self-surveillance, but surveillance across networks and how you are tracked, who is watching you?

Third Generation Computing and Project Proposal

'...in third generation computing, technologies of surveillance are invisible and pervasive – nowhere and yet everywhere – reconfiguring the dynamic between seer and seen; one is ‘watched’ all the time, yet by no one and from nowhere is particular.'

Source: http://wi.hexagram.ca/1_1_html/1_1_pdf/wi.1.1.andrea.zeffiro.pdf

This has got me thinking about a form to the project:

Begin by taking one subject and exploring the various ways technology is ingrained and codified into this persons life, and exploring each avenue, almost turning this persons life into an interface in which for the user to explore, a wheel like a panoptican, where instead of having the guard in the middle with the subjects unaware, have the subject in the middle with the various ways this person's life if codified and projected through dataveillance and self-surveillance technologies.

-------------------------------

Looking at all the different technologies and the how these in a sense control this fictional character, how they survey him, and in various ways interact with his everyday life.

Visually, almost like a circle, with the avatar in the middle (the fictional character), and the various nodes, and codified technologies that interact with that avatar placed in circle surrounding him. The user can click on each node or section to show and illustrate how these different technologies control, survey this character through consumption of technologies. 

I have this image of a humanoid interface ('a meshing of the human and the machine')

1. For example one node may lead to a timeline of this characters location using a GPS signal, of course this is fictional - but with all these technologies I have been finding it is definitely a possibility: 'Phones equipped with Global Positional System (GPS) software enable the collection of personal information whereby data about the user becomes an object of exchange. The ‘phoneur’ leaves traces in the virtual world as he/she enters and manoeuvres in spaces that are systematically codified into data'.
2. One may lead to a fractured and elusive flash video of all the various statuses, revealing in various ways how this user projects himself on the internet... creating a narrative of his/her day through images, text, videos and so on:  'Uploads and downloads symbolically construct the individual simultaneously as consumer and producer and as part of the audience in the postmodern age in which boundaries between categories are blurred and increasingly eroded.'
3. A contacts tab, where the user can search among a group of other avatars, to see what his friends are doing (like a social network site) - and a link to a GPS signal, or where they are located on a map: [showing how both the subject and other users private information become objects of exchange in this system]
4. Access to a digitalized diary
5. The various photos, images and text the user has uploaded in the day, showing a particular narrative

The body becomes codified and in-grained into these technologies, the way we live our everyday lives are dependent on these technologies. However these are beyond a totalitarian state monitoring from above but rather we consent to these technologies and take part in a participatory culture.

The point of turning a human into an interface with various nodes is to illustrate the various ways we depend on these technologies, how they are in-grained into our lives and has led a 'control society' where we can simultaneously be controlled at the same time through different methods, but also how they invite through our consumption of different technological devices (such as Locative Media) the collapsing of the public/private and the move towards a participatory surveillance.


These are some of the possible nodes --- but there is potential for many more.

Here is a rough visualization of what it could look like:

Also in regard to the consumption of new forms embedded with gps and locative tech:

'The phoneur is thus embedded in a network data structure which produces social relations based on commodity production and consumption. Manuel Castells refers to this as the ‘space of flows’, in which capitalist production and consumption are submitted to panoptic surveillance of activities within the wired and wireless networks...thus creating new geographies of surveillance which incorporate the wired body within this landscape.'


Source: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/03-ibrahim.php

Locative Dystopia

'The mobile phone puts the Panoptic eye in your pocket and places the body within the circuits of dataveillance, not only extending the reach of surveillance but also changing its form. With the arrival of Location-Based Services control mechanisms are marketed as consumer products, such as services that enable parents to track the movements of their children 24 hours per day, without consent if the child is under fifteen, even if with often unpredictable results (3). These - like the use of picture phones and the rise of 'cellphone vigilantes' (Mitchell) - highlight the arrival of lateral or 'synaptic' surveillance, in which the top-down model of State-sponsored surveillance is displaced by a situation in which contents are generated within and circulate across horizontal networks, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the subjects of surveillance from its agents.'

And this quote in particular in relation to all the images and videos I have been encountering mobile phones is particularly interesting in regard to consumption, pleasure and surveillance (Particularly the LG diagram):

[The control society... 'Here control is seen less a means of controlling deviancy, crime or terrorism, more a way of managing consumption and the smooth flow of goods and desires, producing not docile subjects so much as better consumers'....]  'This too is illustrated by Location-Based Services, where control mechanisms are transformed into consumer products, deployed for cell based marketing or remodelled as entertainment and a source of pleasure (4). As with the spectacular success of Big Brother, surveillance and control here become cultural entities in their own right, in which the locative capacity itself is embraced and consumed like any other service, as a form of culture or leisure.'

Source: http://www.drewhemment.com/2004/locative_dystopia_2.html

Some interesting images...

Tracking devices on mobile phones, deciding your route... I just like the visuals in how there is an extension beyond the interface of the phone in which it can advise you on the route you go on when exercising.


















I liked the aesthetic style of this one, the meshing of new technologies and new forms of communication.

Post Modern Virtualities

A few quotes I picked out from Mark Poster's 'Postmodern Virtualities'

'The crucial political question is `Who controls the switches?' There are two extreme choices. Users may have indirect, or limited control over when , what, why, and from whom they get information and to whom they send it. That's the broadcast model today, and its seems to breed consumerism, passivity, crassness, and mediocrity. Or, users may have decentralized, distributed, direct control over when, what, why, and with whom they exchange information.'


'The problem for capitalism is how to contain the word and the image, to bind them to proper names and logos when they flit about at the speed of light and procreate with indecent rapidity, not arborially, to use the terms o f Deleuze and Guattari, as in a centralized factory, but rhyzomically, at any decentered location'


'The Internet interface must somehow appear "transparent," that is to say, appear not to be an interface, not to come between two alien beings and also seem fascinating, announcing its novelty and encouraging an exploration of the difference of the machinic. The problem of the Internet the n is not simply "technological" but para-machinic: to construct a boundary between the human and the machinic that draws the human into the technology, transforming the technology into "used equipment" and the human into a "cyborg," into one meshing with machines. '

This last quote seems particularly interesting in relation to what I have been reading from Deleuze regarding the control society, and  with this notion of the human "meshing" with the machines --- whereby new technologies (and interfaces) in turn produce new forms of control. But in our culture we are so in-grained (the cyber-human condition) in this type of culture and technological practice it becomes unnoticed and moreover common-sense.

Societies of Control

'The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighbourhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position - licit or illicit - and effects a universal modulation' 


Just a few observations...
- Everyday life becoming codified and regulated, controlling, not as a material force, but through different and new forms of technology.
- Interesting to think that there is longer these distinct zones in which we enter and leave, we are constantly and perpetually occupying several zones in contemporary society - we never finish working, we never finish socializing, we never finish learning - it is perpetual and constant, and they over-lap and over-lay:


In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.

And even looking at an image from a mobile phone, you can begin to see how within even a menu it encapsulates this collapsing of disciplinary socities, with work, education and socila work co-existing (to name a few):

- But in the end new technoliges impose new forms of control and regulation on our lives - e-mail - for example - we can always be contacted outside work - do you ever finish working? and these new forms of technology in turn change how you live your life and go about living your everyday.
- These codifed technolgies in a sense impose and regulate you, and in a sense collapse the differences between different sections of life - we no longer live in disciplinary socities (where we are controlled by seperate institutions) - but socities of control - where new technologies lead to multiple sources of control, which are constant.


'The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.'

Key thing to look at now: how could I visualize this?

People to read:

http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/writings/internet.html

The Mobile Phone of the Future

After some brain-storming, I have come up with a potential idea, I want to take the infrastructure of the mobile phone and imagine the possibilities of the mobile phone of the future in accordance with the current trajectory of mobile phone technologies.

Imagining in terms what you can store on the phone (data about your personal life), social networking sites (imagining how these will involve with new technologies) and so on.

Therefore I want to re-create a mobile phone interface in a web browser and make it fully functional with apps (ipod-touch) or using Ovi store icons (nokia) and imagining the new features mobile phones could have - but also how these new features can feed back into a new surveillance culture, and the merging of the public and private and how the gaze is changing.

Also I have found a few tutorials on how to create mobile interfaces in photoshop:

http://www.adobetutorialz.com/articles/2979/1/Nokia-5300-Cell-phone-interface

http://www.knowtebook.com/graphics-how-to-make-a-cell-phone-interface-in-photoshop-994.htm

Redefining Surveillance

An interesting animation on how facebook and twitter have changed our everyday lives, what it is to be in the public gaze.

Facebook - --- a new form of Surveillance

'There is a complex, multi-layered interplay between the surveillant gaze – embedded in communication technologies – and in everyday personal communication routines at an individual level; this is giving way to a new surveillance, where the act is consensual and guilt (of convenience and pleasure with a cost) shared. Newer media technologies are restructuring the nature of information-sharing and communications on a day-to-day basis, with long-term influences we have yet to see.'

This quote seemed particularly pertinent with the route I was going with self-surveillance technology and interfaces such as facebook and mobilephone apps. To elaborate, exploring that surveillance on the internet (and specifically social networking sites) is working on a new level, where we invite the gaze bringing up new issues of privacy, the gap between the public and the private, voyeurism, information sharing, marketing and so on. But also from reading this, and other articles I get the sense that facebook has become a neccesity and a must have in contemporary society, and these issues are something that 'we' as users have to deal with in order to keep up with new forms of technology.

Surveillance society embedded into the everyday

I came across this image while searching the internet, and I think it brings up some interesting issues in relation to how consumer goods, such as mobile phones, are embedded with surveillance technology, where you can be constantly tracked. However contrary to the idea of the state 'watching over you', you, the user, invite people to 'watch over you', to find out where you are and what you are doing. And this relates back to my earlier quote from Feury: ' Have all these new technologies (internet, mobile phones and so on), that have become such an integral part of our daily habits in terms of communication, working life, and socializing , created the intrusion of regulation? ... The more our lives and memories become translated into data, the longer the power remains unnoticed, and the more ingrained its government becomes.''




Will be interesting to think about in relation to a project, and how surveillance has made us subjected to another, almost unnoticed, our own consumption of new technology invites these new forms of gaze, even if that subjection is our friends. It is also interesting how mobile phones, and their interfaces encourage you to document your daily lives, through my-post-it note apps, social networking apps, photo file folders, memos, pdf readers and so on. And in particular the photo bellow shows how you (voluntarily) can be tracked from your mobile phone by friends, and vice-versa - but who knows who else uses this data. 

New Media and the Gaze

From the book New Media: culture and image:

'The gaze is still part of how new media culture is formed. Parallels can be drawn between the introduction of television and the browsing of new media within the context of the gaze. Each new media technology requires user input, either through a remote control, keyboard, keypad, gamewand, MP3 player - the element of dexterity is essential to the technology coming alive and acquiring or igniting our gaze. (2009: 121)

Maybe exploring new narratives in the case of new media technologies and how we are governed by such technologies - looking at how we are always in the gaze with these new technologies - Mobile phones, internet - but creating a visualization of this - similar to Jody Zellen. This is moreover to do with how image culture governs our gaze.

However in this way celebrity culture is mentioned regularly in regard to surveillance culture, and the blurring of the private and the public.

In today's society, 'we' are obsessed with the lives of celebrities and inner personal lives being available for the public gaze.

Perhaps I could create a project that explores the voyeuristic fantasy on the viewers part by using images from the internet, newspapers and magazines to construct a narrative for a celebrity, in which the use can 'browse' and almost follow along this celebrities narrative.

Source: Feury, Kelli (2008) New Media: Culture and Image. Palgrave Macmillian

Surveillance, Technology and Paranoia

Following on from the film I watched last week, it has led me into new directions and lines of enquiry in relation to my project.

I have been reading Kelli Feury's book New Media: Culture and Image, some of the passages seemed particularly pertinent in relation to the topic I want to cover:

'The many ways we interact with new media technologies are acts of surveillance: we watch the consequences of our interactions with new media, waiting for the outcomes, the immediate feedbacks - and these are acts that are partly (if not entirely) based on visual confirmation of what we have done.'



This position is an apposite framework for how facebook and other social networking sites.

Also I found it interesting with new technologies in relation to new anxieties arising out of using such technologies:

'For freud, this internal anxiety is imagined, whereas external anxiety is, more often than not, real.  Paranoia is produced through the mechanisms of projection, whereby subject place their worry onto an object that presents no threat'

And specifically in relation to how technology has become so ingrained into our culture, our own private lives, in which we are never far from the public eye through such things as Facebook that anxiety is generated from this constant fear of being watched and documented:

'If our axieties stem from acts of projection, from an inability to clearly and readily assess knowledge as answers - Are we being watched? When? By whom?- can we say that new media has produced a culture of subjection? Have all these new technologies (internet, mobile phones and so on), that have become such an integral part of our daily habits in terms of communication, working life, and socializing , created the intrusion of regulation? ... The more our lives and memories become translated into data, the longer the power remains unnoticed, and the more ingrained its government becomes.'

She talks of nano-technologies and 'roborats' - unnable to control their own movements, being dictated by an other.

Maybe exploring how technologies have become so in-grained in our culture, that we forget them, but at the same time, we are become ever more governed. Both through external regulation (the fear that we are being watched all the time by technology) and self-regulation.

More to follow...

The Divide between Public and Private.

I have come up with some more ideas on an area or theme if you like that I want to touch on with this project. The area being the private and public divide and how computer interfaces, TV and media in general close this gap.

In this regard the film I have just watched We Live in Public encapsulates many of these ideas. The film content primarily deals with Josh Harris, one of the .com generation and how he pre-empted and predicted shows like Big Brother and social networks through his own social experiments Citizen of the Quiet and We Live in Public.

Citizen of the Quiet had a group of people living in a underground 'bunker', provided with food, entertainment, and pod-like beds being filmed 24/7. Through this he explored what Surveillance can do to the human condition, and how contestants increasingly felt the need to be seen, and this in turn affected their own personal identity of who they thought they were, but also by being filmed 24/7 how they would like to be perceived.  This arguabaly is as one of the interviewees says a 'physical embodiment of myspace'. There is a need to be seen, to be watched, enjoyment and satisfaction is generated through people liking your photos or statuses. You are screaming out look at me, know who I am, this very medium conditions how you perceive yourself and others. You in a sense invite the public into the private, it breaks this boundary.

His other project, the name of the film, We Live in Public takes this concept even further, he set up surveillance equipment all around his home, and through these web-cams broadcast his entire life onto the internet. Users were able to chat simultaneously while watching the 'show'. More increasingly the users would put both Josh and Tanya up to something, for example making Josh sleep on the bed. After having an argument once, they both went to check how that argues unfolded, and to get the users in-put about who was in the right, and in the wrong. Again, there is this desire to be seen, but also to know how you are perceived, and how your own personal identity is constructed is apparent. The users could in a sense control their actions by being allowed into the private sphere of the home.

As Josh remarks ' Big Brother isn't a person, it is a collective conciousness that watches over you...'

Researching Net.Art

I have come across a few websites that have an interesting array of internet/net-art projects which deal with some interesting theoretical concepts as well as adopt a unique aesthetic style:

http://www.diaart.org/artist_web_projects
and http://www.net-art.org/?page=1

The project on the DIA art website that stood out to me was 'I Wish I was Born In A Hollywood Movie by Maja Bajevic (2006). The Flash-based website uses images of an array of locations an artists has photographed that run counter to Hollywood's idealised 'reality'. Bajevic uses pop-up windows which with each subsequent links brings up another image of this 'bleak' reality. She does this by using images of run-down motels, staircases, streets and so on.

Through this suggests that however far removed Hollywoods reality it 'infiltrate[s] on various levels to influence our desires or expectations.' and that those in situations such as what is displayed in the pop-up windows, who may have no chance of getting out of that situation, are ever wanting to live a hollywood movie which offers an idealised lifestyle. (Maja Bajevic Intro)

Moreover the style of this project is fragmented and over-laying which I would like to possibly replicate when exploring how media images only represent a fragmented and distorted view of 'reality'.

Also after reading the introduction on this particular artist she has also dealt with the boundaries between the public and the private, and how images of war invite the public into the private. This could be something I deal with when I explore the proliferation of the media into our everyday lives.

Jody Zellen and a Possible Project

I have been looking at some of Jody Zellens art work which deals with urban environments and the web as a space to sculpt the city.

The style of much of her net-art uses fragmented, abstracted and distorted images (often photographs from the internet and mass media) to give the sense of how the net can be used to sculpt an imaginary space. For example  Crowds and Power (2002) uses images of crowds and pop-up windows of individuals to show how the individual is displaced and forgotten in such urban environments. The individual becomes lost in the crowd.

This is the type of style I would like to use in my project. But also this has led me to some more ideas I could potentially use for my project. To begin, the mass media creates a selected view of the world and presents it to the reader, user or spectator 24 hours every day. I want to take one day and collect as much as images, videos, sound clips and written text, and create a virtual space for all this information in a similar style to Jody Zellen. Through this illustrate how the user is bombarded with information on a daily basis, and by fragmenting and distorting this information show how we only see a small world view of each of these events in the mass media. The user will be able to explore this day through the use of animations, images, hypertext links, pop-ups and so on.

More to follow...

Independent Production

01/10/2010


We have just completed the first session on independent production, and through this process of discussing what we may do for our project as a group I have decided I want to develop and further what I have started last year in Web Media. 


Last year me and another member created a project on simulation and simulacrum. We used the medium of a time line in order to simulate a nuclear event. Within the time line we used secondary sources from the internet in order to create this nuclear event. Through this we hoped to show how secondary sources could be re-mediated and used to simulate an entirely new event.


With this in mind, I thought about creating a web version of Jeffrey Shaw's Legible City, and using hyper-text and flash animation to re-create an area, to simulate an area. However this is only an initial idea for such a project. As well as this another possibility is something similar to Ghost City which takes the city and distorts it using images, sounds and flash animations, whereby it is not simply representational as with Legilble City but it uses images from the mass media to 'sculpt' a space/city on the web.


Also along these same lines, in the first semester of Web Media I did a project called myHouse in which I took the concept of the home, moreover the spaces inhabited in the home and distorted and fragmented it, I was thinking of possibly taking this to a larger scale.