One thing that I got from this reading is that mail art is carefully created and designed, but then pushed through a system (which can be seen as the Big Monster that Carrion speaks upon). Within the system the work can get altered, damaged, or even completely disregarded which can symbolize how we carefully create ourselves, whether it be personality or outside aesthetic, but once we are put out into the world and face "the Big Monster" we too might become damaged or disregarded. I also think an interesting point that Carrion brings up is the recipient list. This piece of art that is created isn't going to be immediately displayed in a gallery, but is instead sent to a carefully curated list which adds an interesting layer of exclusivity to the medium.
I think the Laurel Schwulst essay has some really interesting points as to why to create a website and your duties when you choose to do so. Particularly I like the metaphor of websites to puddles and how a website usually forms after a storm of ideas flow into one specific place and eventually evaporate. Personally, the Edouard U essay was slightly harder to keep track of because of its more 'flowery' language that it uses. However, one thing that spoke to me in his essay was "I believe conceptual isolation creates the death of meaning" and how "compartmentalizing..builds walls that are hard to tear down". I like how the author talks about how everything is interconnected or inspired by another thing so if you think of one particular work or idea in isolation it looses half of its potency.
I found some of the information in the first section of the text challenging to read because it seemed like a lot of information packed into each paragraph, but I thought it was interesting how both sections defined the differences in print and digital and how print is "also the display itself", but the fact that print is practically unchangeable once produced can make the medium outdated easier. However, it is also more collectable and finite. But then I also liked how it described how there could be hybrid publications where each copy of a book is individually computer-generated "thus disrupting the fixed 'serial' nature of print." Also, I have learned about the monopoly that Berlusconi has over Italian media so I thought it was interesting to be brought up in the context of this class.
I actually found this reading really helpful in getting to know more about geocities and its audiences/users. I was first shocked at how long it took to download all the preserved geocities archives, I get frustrated when my computer takes more than a few minutes to download something, I cant imagine months. I also found the names of the different cities interesting. They weren't just categories like art or science, but rather soho (for art) and pentagon (for military/government). Within pentagon, I was curious as to why the most used graphic was Felix the cat. I didn't know who this character was at first so I had to google to find out he was a silent cartoon villain, but where's the association with the government? I also found it sad that the author found so many websites with unfulfilled promises to update the website, it really drove home the analogy of viewing the websites like someone observing the ruins of Pompeii. I was shocked with the wide variety of people who made websites on geocities, I would have thought it was just geeks and teens, but the fact that 50 year old housewives were present and active shocked me. And finally the comparison the author made between the borders repeating on newer screens to how tree rings shows their age was a very good visualization.
This weekend I am attending the AIGA design conference and I feel like one thing I have heard multiple times, but also saw a bit in this reading, is how design is being undervalued. This prompted the question: do non-creatives view design as a true art form anymore or has it just become very trivialized? In todays everyday life we see advertisements and graphics and websites 24/7. A lot of the times I feel like we overlook these things for their true identity as art, but rather as a means of transporting our ideas from one place to another (in the case if most websites). I feel like design has become less of the attraction in and of itself and more as a disregarded stepping stone.
I think this article was very informative about what alt-text is and how biased it can be. I particularly found page 35 to be informative on how nothing can be truly objective when describing an image and often times objectivity is synonymous with a "white, cis, middle and upper-class men while marking other perspectives as 'subjective'." I also think the nature of description in general is very subjective, when describing an image, where do you start? What objects do you highlight first? To be completely objective would you rather set an industry standard of starting In the top-left-hand corner even though it might be arbitrary? I also like that the author highlighted that who the author is and their background strongly affects their descriptions. Their references or general conventions will inherently affect their writings so it might be important to acknowledge who they are.
One theme that I I enjoyed finding it repeated throughout the text is how postmodernism style or aesthetic consists of fragmentation. At first I was really confused when it first mentioned this on page nine with its description being "The design object was allowed to be the visual representation of the Texts irreducibility." I couldn't picture the applications of this style of design with this sentence, but I finally understood what "fragmentation" meant when applied on page 33. On this page they use Disney as an example of a design that is highly popularized but is always shown fragmented. "Disney imagery is never shown in its completeness or unadulterated, it is always just a fragment, a gloved hand, circular ears or characteristic Disney script.." I had never intentionally thought about it, but Disney had done such a good job with their branding that by even just a small snippet of their total brand or identity we can almost immediately recognize it which signifies/makes us think of the brand as a whole. I then started to try to think of other examples of this but all I could think of is smaller examples like when we see a glass bottle with a red wrapper, we automatically think of coke, or McDonald's and their Golden Arches, but none seem to be such a perfect example as the Disney "empire" which is interesting.
As someone who doesn't know a lot about coding languages in general, I had not realized that the coding languages we use are not translated into other popular languages around the world. I had never thought about the fact that coding would be inaccessible to people who do not speak English because a lot of popular coding languages, like the HTML and CSS we use in class, are written primarily with English indicators like "id" or "class" or "transform". Also programs that are typically coded left to right, up to down, would be very unintuitive for someone who may speak Arabic like the text mentions. I think this is definitely a problem with most coding languages that will become more and more talked about and I'm curious to see how people try to solve this issue in the future, outside of the examples shown in the text.
This text reminded me of the one constant stream of LoFi Girl where it is just a cartoon figure doing homework while ambient music is playing in the background. I know people that every time they study they always listen to that one channel. It also reminds me of during covid when people started creating mass zooms (some of which are still open today) to just sit in silence and do homework together. Kind of like a buddy system so you don’t get too distracted. One thing that I was confused by in the text is when the author compares publishing to a texture. Is it because of the endlessness of the feed that individual posts no longer stand out but rather get lost in the grand scheme of the feed in general?
This text talks mostly about the work String Games. This piece involved two groups of people mimicking the movements of fingers performing different string games such as cat’s cradle. Videos of each group were then placed on two screens to act as two hands performing these movements. The author of the text also speaks about the work in relation to another piece entitled Body Missing. In this work, people were asked to “reflect on the indeterminacy of historical memory”. Tuer talks about both pieces in relation to the aspects that are lost in archival processes. In string games, “the archival traces of the participants… embody a poetics of absence.” And in Body Missing, “hypertext thread stories and archival evidence of missing artworks evokes a poetics of mourning by alluding to the collective trauma of the Holocaust.”
I really enjoyed reading about "The Way" and "The Beyond" in Beyond Dark Matter from Logic Issue 15. I thought that this text conveyed a very important message about the awful past that computers have that I previously did not know about. I had never head about the "Master/Slave" computer terminology nor the historical ties computers hold. This text does a very good job at explaining computer terminology and concepts in real-world contexts. Overall the message was heavy, but the comic/graphic novel stylistic choices made me become very interested in the text.
I enjoyed reading this text and found it really interesting how multiple different things/topics were compared in ways I had never thought about. One thing that I learned was that Google was using people, unknowingly, who fill out captcha (to prove they are not a bot) to transform old texts into an "accurate, searchable and easily sortable computer text file ." These people were being used to provide unpaid, involuntary labor. and the text mentions that in the process "they had become robots...in order to prove they were human." Another quote I found very fascinating in this text was, "Supreme beauty in capitalist terms is achieved when a human body is able to work, day in, and day out, virtually without food: utility equals beauty." Lastly, in another course we have been talking about a certain sculpture that had to be removed because the workers inside a local building found it too large and intrusive. In this text, in one part the author mentions, "When you leave the museum it [art] will stay behind, just like switching off a game. Its effects can be limited and reversible, yet you can still enjoy the best of all possible world."