Hacktivism

An incident of hactivism from 2008.

Self Portrait(s) [As Other(s)] response

This was my first encounter with algorithmically generated literature, and more often than not, I simply found the results amusing, as far as their actual content. I found myself engaged more by the attention that this format draws to the generalized format of the biography, or the shorter biographic article or blog. It looks at the expectation that such articles are meant to show, and the fact that such literary formats are formulaic and algorithmic by nature, perhaps emphasizing routine aspects of the subject's life that may or may not be as sequentially important as the article proposes.

Secondarily, I found the intentionally conflicting data amusing, as it could have easily been prevented with a few lines of code. This intentional discontinuity could be making a number of symbolic points, but ultimately, it just served to remind the reader of the mistakes as intentional, to prevent from being taken too seriously.

Link to Scratch project

Behold Dragcat!

Leveling History: New Media and 9/11

This project was influenced by the typography and visual aesthetic of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, his message about the acceleration of media creation and consumption, and his concept of the global village. As an application of this, I was fascinated with the implications of tracking the consumption and creation of media over the cultural life of a historical event like 9/11. To me, it seemed that 9/11’s cultural impression was created at a crucial juncture between what I call vertical and horizontal history, the difference between vertical and horizontal being the manner in which cultural consciousness comes to embed itself into history. While a vertical model of history largely disseminates through dominant news media, horizontal history comes into being through shared experience and a democratization of legitimacy. In other words, not one voice is considered more valuable or trustworthy intrinsically than another. This movement from vertical to horizontal experience is something I want to chronicle as happening in the last eight years, at least in part, using the discussion of 9/11 as a backdrop.

I decided to work with the visual aesthetic of the profile of the World Trade center, charting the historical impact through media progressing from the upper points of impact, and working down to their current day applications. Several of the texts include hyperlinks to embellish the intended effects of their wording, allowing me to keep the composition relatively uncluttered, and still linking to an abundance of information available, almost like using citations in a paper to reference larger bodies of work behind the piecemeal quotations that happen to support my point. The primary shift, or uniform direction of new media that has further fragmented the 9/11 narrative, and the one that I chose to fixate on in this project, was the advent of social networking tools, particularly communal media sharing such as youtube, flickr, and blogging communities such as blogger that have allowed new media to consolidate, or at least proliferate individual voices to the level of mass media. In 2001, mass media was undoubtedly recognized in television, print, and radio, but the internet was still seen as too small a niche for product placement, advertisement, and broadcasting. Individual freedom of expression was rampant, but no codification of that expression was able to leverage its power for the mass distribution of ideas.

The last eight years, by contrast, have seen the rise of consolidation services like the ones I mentioned above, resulting in the latent discovery by millions of people of media that would have gone largely unnoticed were it not for McLuhan’s “global village” coming to life in the various communities, tribes, and even growing nations on the web. The ultimate divergent expressions of this outworking are the two notes that my project ends with at the base of the towers. One leads to the wikipedia entry on 9/11, presumably what a future individual may look to for the definitive account of the event, compiled and refined over time from a community of knowledge, codified and respected as authoritative; the other displays a running feed of twitter posts that contain the term “9/11” in their 140 character messages, providing an up to the moment account of current cultural digestion of 9/11. To me, this represents the currency of our social exchange of ideas and interests, our new cultural coherence of events, our horizontal history.

Medium is the Massage picture(s)