diptychs

works updated

draft #2, please comment/email me.

GOING FOR ADS

In this group of work I have used only internet advertisements to create pieces concerned with how internet users navigate, perceive, and conceive of the medium of the web site and the internet as a whole. The title of the series is a reference to the phrase “going for adds” used by music distributors in reference to the date the new album of the artist they are promoting can be first played on the radio. In seeking out internet advertisements I am doing the opposite of what internet users have trained themselves to do since the inception of internet advertising which is to ignore such ads. As fast as advertisers devise new ways of making “impressions” on users, users adapt to these tactics and become immune to them just as quickly. The term “banner blindness” has been used to describe the phenomenon of users instinctively ignoring the advertisements that frame the content of web pages, thus eliminating the use value of these areas to both advertisers and users alike. In the same way that going to see the Great Pacific Garbage Patch seems to be the only way to believe in and understand it, I have sought out internet ads, in a sense the visual refuse of the internet, and appropriated, reconfigured, recycled, and collaged them so as to finally acknowledge their existence, examine how internet users orient themselves online through sight, and perhaps create beautiful images out of compositional elements that are otherwise intuitively ignored by the eyes of internet users.

Average Impression

This is a collage of 66 nearly-transparent vertical-format banner ads (approximately 160 x 600 pixels) that, when layered on top of each other, create something of an average of composition and color for this size banner ad. I see it as something like the ocular impression made from years of seeing-without-consciously-registering innumerable instances of ads of this shape. Light emanates out of the computer screen through ads like this from the edge of web pages into the edges of the users’ retinas but is rarely if ever the focus of its vision. Here it is both brought in an out of focus – an abstract form representing something of a template for all ads of its kind. While the true intensity of a star in the night sky is often clearest when seen through one’s periphery, this piece instead confronts the eyes with a record of what they have simultaneously seen and not seen on almost every web page they have ever explored.

Depth of Field: Ad Pool 118

This piece combines 118 internet ads of all different shapes and sizes. Ultimately, no one ad is completely visible or legible, and the viewer has the choice of either attempting to make out individual ads or allowing the composition to visually wash over them as a whole. I see this as a revisiting of the moment of the decision made by the internet user’s mind, manifested through its use of eyesight, each time it is confronted with a new advertising strategy. It can be simultaneously appear a depthless two-dimensional surface of ads and a deep pool of colors and imagery which combine to create a greater combined image (or illusion).

Deductive Structure: Army Chasm

This piece was inspired by Frank Stella’s early paintings made with concentric black brushstrokes of uniform-width in which each painting’s content was dictated by the shape of its stretcher bars, its edges. Here, a banner ad for the Army Reserve is copied ad infinitum, creating an image of concentric borders which frame and re-frame an ever-receding, dissolving void where online “content” would normally reside. In their innate search for e-“substance,” our searching eyes are instead confronted with and enclosed by a two-dimensional chasm of imagery they are trained to literally marginalize if not completely eliminate.

Newer Realism

These pieces were inspired by the Nouveau Realistes, a group of artists in Paris in the early ‘60s, some of whom (namely Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains) made collages using scraps of street advertisements. My “collages” layer “scraps” of banner ads over each other to create abstract final products, a digital revisiting of the technique of the Nouveau Realistes who strove to create a heightened realism in their works through the recycling of society’s detritus. The juxtaposition of my digital works with those of Villeglé and Hains draws attention to the question of depth in the plane of the browser window and asks the viewer to reconsider his or her conception of the materiality of the internet.

Topography

This piece was inspired by Maya Lin’s topological cut-outs of atlases. In my piece, banner ads are cut up and arranged so as to confound the viewer’s sense of depth on an internet page. The piece can simultaneously be seen as two holes through a pile of banner ads receding into the screen, two towers of banner ad pieces rising out of the screen, or simply a series of perfectly fitted rings cut from different ads.

I emailed this to Nick yesterday re: his initial descriptions of his work.

"In seeking out internet advertisements I am doing the opposite of what internet users have trained themselves to do since the inception of internet advertising which is to ignore such ads. As fast as advertisers devise new ways of making “impressions” on users, users adapt to these tactics and become immune to them just as quickly."
- relates to: topology, the eyes constructing a surface of vision (which could be viewed as a kind of material---the surface painted over and presented to the mind by the roving, editing, slap-dash eye)
- so maybe---is the kind of surface you've composed what we're actually "seeing"?
- and in general, if this is what we see, or if these pieces speak to what we might be not-seeing, are we seeing anything at all? the choice you've made to inundate our eye with streaks of color---formless, information-less---reminds me not only of the hectic overload of ads, and the sometimes-necessity of self-editing them (for sanity's sake) but of the anxiety this implies, i.e., am i getting anything at all? what information am i missing if i can unwittingly edit my informational intake, even as i spend a long time "reading" a page?

"analyze their aesthetics," going out to the garbage patch to see it
- i don't think you're analyzing the aesthetics of the ads, or holding them up to the light, or "going out to see them" a la the patch---that project would be like a shitty andy warhol diptych thing, don't you think? i think what you're analyzing here is sight and sight as orienting us in and creating our understanding of online space. the object here seems to be sight itself, not what is seen (although you talk about vision through re-formulating what we see/don't see).
i think this could relate to some writing i'm doing about the internet as a text, and text (and as an extension, banner ads) as space


"and perhaps create beautiful images out of compositional elements that are otherwise intuitively ignored by the eyes of internet users."
- i think you're creating beautiful images that SHOW blindness in a really cool, seemingly-contradictory way. like, what we see is an illustration of intuitive ignorance/blindess.

two responses

gyre-ads+balanced+118

a stationary pool of gasoline and oils floating above melted and coagulated printouts of web text. in this i mean there is the deception of the organic, when we gaze at the rainbow refleted out of the gasoline pool, sickening runoff and refuse. the same deception is found in the deep orange and red, toxic sunrise and sunsets, measurements of pollution levels and fucking great desktop pictures.

rather than a collage effect, that is, a strictly two-dimensional ransom-note style cut and paste, you've made a painting, of course. the colors bleed into one another, oil or acrylic or whatever kind of cyber-paint that never really dries, retaining its wet glossiness.

i stare long enough and i see a face, some type of mouse-shaped skull, anthropormophic and pissed off. a hint at three dimensions. a ghost. the kind of image from a newspaper you find in the park or the forest, that's been sitting out there in the dirt and rain for days, all the print colors slowly smushing into each other.

i see clouds too, i think. vanilla and toxic. good call with the number 118.

army+chasm.

this is great. can you make it really really big? because the image expands beyond my screen all i can do is put two fingers on the mouse pad and swirl it around a bunch. if i go side to side it feels like i am turning my head to look different sides of the hallway. beginning to go in swirls makes a spiral, and going in swirls very very fast makes triangles. see? okay now i am nauseous.

new work

visual foragers

An interesting metaphor I've come across in the "website usability" community is that of internet users as animals foraging for food and sites having varying levels of "information scent" drawing users their way. To try to tie it into the garbage discussion I'm reminded of the Flower Island film Adrian posted, in which third-world pigs and people - in that order - forage for sustenance among the refuse of first-world society. To combine this with the garbage patch metaphor of the internet, one could consider internet users as the foragers from the film, each adrift in his/her/its own raft among the gyre of information spiraling through the internet void/ocean, passing through/over the invisible mass, trying to sniff out their own desired fare.

The way we forage is what I've been been thinking about lately, and this site Alert Box has been my main source of non-theoretical, practical research from inside the industry, especially their "eye tracking" technology. I recently used their findings to create this piece (below) that uses the F-shape pattern, especially pronounced in Google search analysis, to relate to the Pacific Garbage Patch and the idea of things being incomprehensible when not visualize-able. It's simple but I like it, though I'm guessing it would be much less effective/interesting without explanation of both sources.

(click to enlarge)


I feel like this also ties in with Lizzie's thinking about the materiality of vision.

while you work

http://www.tenement.org/folksongs/client/

sound map!
this was just one of the sidebar links to the google-maps-killed-bambi article.
it's also really pretty to listen to, i think.

eyesight as material --> affectivity as a reading of this material?

That article about blinking is really cool. This info about synchronized blinking inspires some pretty paranoid conclusions. I think this reveals the extent to which the visual sense is seen as the ultimate conqueror of space, the ultimate/unproblematic linking of navigation and mapping into an instantaneous procedure of traveling eye movement and a corresponding "true" knowledge of existing space and its components. And I think this new awareness of patterns of blinking and our accumulative blindness means that we begin to view eyesight as a representational strategy. I think this means we have a new relationship to eyesight as a type of material. Both the infallibility we accord to the eye as a navigating/mapping device and our new understandings of its lapses as such points towards a consideration of seeing as a representational strategy, a representation that the eyes (and brain) create for the mind. What I mean: in realizing that the eye fails to map all space by seeing (or that it doesn't see space, but that this space nevertheless exists, not just objectively but exists to us despite its not necessarily being SEEN), we begin to recognize sight as a certain material representation of a reality that eludes the senses, gesturing to us from elsewhere.

hm

I realized what I just posted is without indents or bolding, so I'm just going to email it as an attachment to everyone.

Notes so far

I think right now I'll just post come of an outline of ideas I've been working with...let me know how it seems to be interacting with you guys' thinking (or not).

- The aim of the kind of academic scholarship based around the interpretation of primary documents can be thought of as an effort similar to the one described by Borges' fable of the cartographers—an attempt to locate the holes in previous study, uncover as-yet-un-thought intellectual territory, claim it, and cover it over, "point for point," with scholarly interpretation ().
- “…digitizing all the library catalogues and deep Web material in the world does not help if the information you need is not there in the first place—and for much of the most interesting kind of research that cataloguing information does not exist” (Landow, 40).
- Landow’s comment energetically claims that the most exciting intellectual substance is that which exceeds the archive, and part of bringing it into the archive—the map of the known—renders it already-read and in some sense makes it invisible, as it loses its un-explored, virginal potential
- In this way, the archive functions to categorically erase the potential of its content, serving as a mausoleum to conquered intellectual territory
- The archive saves only to exclude its content from the un-known lands of the innovative
- Of course, archived scholarly material can become the object of future study, representation replacing the “real”-ness of the primary documents, just as the map in Borges’ tale began to fray

- The relationship of those who flatten out and bring into the light previously un-known sermons, letters, documents to this information is in this way complicated  what does it mean to have discovered and mapped this intellectual space? Its relationship to its cartographer seems lingering and conflicted, for to find and write about newly-discovered primary sources means both to uncover and recover
- Landow’s anecdote about the old John Ruskin correspondence he found in Ruskin’s goddaughter’s garage when she asked him if he wanted to “look through some old things,” reads not just as an entertaining “barefoot-in-the-snow” story or as a counter-point to the supposed usefulness of internet catalogues, but as an effort to reactivate the excitement of coming upon a hole in the current spread of historical data, which, by virtue of his discovery, became just some more papers in a vault—deadened not only by their membership to the house of the already-known, but submerged under the more accessible, more trusted reading that he himself published about them
- What happens when original source material gets published to the internet in conjunction with the book that would have previously eclipsed it, reburied it in the archive? The internet here is being used to combat the archive as a mausoleum to the already-known
- Karl Jacoby published hundreds of pages of original court documents from the Camp Grant Massacre of 1871 on the companion website he created for his book Shadows at Dawn
- Instead of reducing the immense volume of information into a single narrative, Jacoby hopes that stretching the boundaries of his work to include its sources will both map more thoroughly and allow knowledge to be mapped again and again.
- It’s tempting to say that there is no text, since its boundaries are potentially infinite
- no difference between the “hard” and “soft” links a reader can truly establish new connections through linking materials
- Jacoby is using the immense storage capacities of the internet to widen the reach of what is considered his “work”
- “Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is "everything"?” (Foucault, 2)
- Jacoby’s publishing action presents readers with a very different relationship to the material than it would had he published all the sources in a printed volume, in which case his own work would seem a minute preface to a re-published historical text
- Does Jacoby’s relinquishing of his material simply add to its impressive scope, i.e. do we still see him, as primary reader, as still “owning” the territory of his source? Does the publication of his source material really allow access, or does it merely reinforce the scope of Jacoby’s efforts?
- Jacoby’s articulation of this relationship is telling. In deciding to create links to hundreds of pages of original source material on the website that accompanied Shadows at Dawn, Jacoby spoke of his desire to “un-flatten” the project
- He hopes to utilize internet-specific concepts of space and accessibility to immerse readers in the material on the companion website
- As if each 2-dimensional page of his interpretation would be built up with layers and layers of its own history, suddenly sharing a kind of three-dimensional space in which the entire flesh of amorphous original material could be accessed along with the particular trail of thoughts and associations Jacoby had bore through it
- As if that which had once eluded the archive, and had been chewed-through and used up through its discovery and interpretation, became instead an endless playground for new learning and new discovery
- The evocation of a 3-dimensional information space in which viewers are invited to navigate is crucial
- Points towards a new conception of materiality as it pertains to the process of reading/writing, orienting an idea of the material towards experience as the material of narrative, the experience as the production of a map of an individual’s travels through intellectual territory
- User not just as the origin of action but as the producer of an intellectually groundbreaking experience and a narrative of knowledge newly-mapped
- There is no “work” except for the pages we have viewed, and in viewing, have bound in time through experiencing them sequentially
- There is no narrative arc except for the story of how and why pages followed one another in a user’s exploration
- The fact of a user’s navigation becomes the both form and content
- Theories about what it means to read, how readers associate and wander through endless pluralities of meaning, [“…the reader of a text may be compared to someone at a loose end…this passably empty subject strolls…on the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below (oued is there to bear witness to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colors, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children’s voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half-identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference only repeatable as difference,” (Barthes 159)] are different from the process of choosing links, and although the processes are obviously connected, they shouldn’t be conflated
- clicking links does not equal a direct manifestation of one’s individual associations and experience of meaning
- association is different from choosing and clicking; a passage through and weaving of associations is different from a sequence of chosen pages
- the mental processes we think of as happening in the human mind as they read, line by line, page by page, a fixed text, we think of as happening in the creation of the “text” space itself, but they should not be conflated!
- is this why we see hypertext as theory “come to life”? like associative trails are not made against and through and around the printed text, but as the very binding experience, ordering, and existence of a hypertext experience

- This contributes directly to our concepts of how we exist in the internet’s “space,” where we conceive of ourselves to be in the virtual binding of page to page as we navigate, choosing to link page to page as we go
- City metaphors vs. ocean metaphors—basically a question of, is there any structure here that is external to our own continual present of viewing page after page? Does space close in around me, or is it marked?
- Also for the ocean: what kind of thinking potential is there in this space? Has it been traveled over, or is it nebulous and un-charted?

SADIE PLANT – Zeros + Ones
- “at sea”  regressive, primordial implications
- she relies on Michel Foucault
- ocean used to refer to unit-less, genre-less thought
- “…dealing with the floods of data which have burst the banks of traditional modes of arranging and retrieving information and are now leaking through the covers of articles and books, seeping past the boundaries of the old disciplines, overflowing all the classifications and orders of libraries, schools, and universities,” (10)
- what does the use of this water metaphor imply?
- the force of the formless, its uniform pressure, breaking through the boundaries of classification through which the categorized derives meaning and secures its place in the archive
- the formlessness of the primordial
- naturalization
- “…so the digital machines of the late twentieth century weave new networks from what ere once isolated words, numbers, music, shapes, smells, tactile textures, architectures, and countless channels as yet unnamed,” (11-12)
- fabric-making as the transformative binding of formless, liquid “channels” of information and thought-substance through which the product of this media is articulated
- “the yarn is neither metaphorical or literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads which twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. In and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles, and looms, cotton and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriters, carriages, electrical filaments, silicon strands, fiber-optic cables, pixeled screens, telecom wires, the World Wide Web, the Net, and matrices to come,” (12)
- fabric as the oldest material for transmitting information
- each new technological development as evoking this ancient substance, this original medium
- actually, fabric is separate from the apparatus of its weaving, so weaving as a process analogous to computing must be thought of as broken up into distinct processes—ie. the mechanics of weaving (shuttles, etc) and the information, which the yarn represents
- there’s a kind of division coexisting in the thread metaphor—it is both and alternately the means (medium) and the thought-material itself
- linearity
- in terms of narrative (multiple entryways to a single narrative—but this narrative is, or may be, constructed linearly from the outside, it’s just that you have the opportunity to enter anywhere…but this is true for a book as well…it’s only that you have no sense of the rest, of the body, of all the pages before and behind you—this seems to be a major component of our reading practices on the internet) (this seems to be a big thing, the constant present of space and time, even with the “back” button, you have nothing except a re-created here and now point, still without material presence of the other nodes, other threads)
- in terms of data retrieval (not having to cycle through all the information to get to the piece you want)
- this experience of disrupting linearity seems more about digital/mechanical processes than reading experience

Affective ZenoPhobia

i've been moseying around on some affect articles... haven't been able to get that one wendy recommended by ien ang, 'in the realm of uncertainty', but

brian massumi has his own website, as does steve shaviro

massumi's introduction to parables of the virtual, 'concrete is as concerete does', is interesting. it's a bit general, being an introduction, but i got some really golden stuff out of it, especially in terms of affect and navigation.

he uses one zeno's paradoxes to talk about movement. the paradox works in that if someone shoots an arrow, it has to pass through a certain number of points to get to its target. however, because there are an infinite number of points in space, and infinity has no end, the arrow in theory should never arrive at its final destination.

obviously it does, and hence the paradox. one of the answers to the paradox (which is bergson's) is that there is a differentiated between space and movement. movement cannot between broken into discrete, "extensive' locations. as beautiful as muybridge's animations are, they are beautiful because they are inherently asymptotic, and will, of course, never be able to fully map/capture the qualitative/intensive experience of human movement.

where massumi takes this to the next level is that once the the arrow actually stops, we can map it.

and therefore:

"A thing is when it isn’t doing. A thing is concretely where and what it is – for example a
successfully shot arrow sticking in a target – when it is in a state of arrest. Concrete is as
concrete doesn’t."

so a thing becomes concrete when it stops becoming, yeah? this fits well into the problem of trash, especially with the gyre and the beaches. we can't map the gyre because the objects are in a constant motion, whereas once trash stops moving, that is when we can manipulate it, or have a more affective relationship with it??

the question of navigation comes up pretty heavy here--and another physics paradox too, when does 'stopping' begin and end, when does 'starting' begin and end? when are we sure that we are navigating, and when are we sure that we have stopped? in terms of navigating the internet, how do the pre-meditated structures from websites to advertisers dealing with the problem of forcing an internet surfer (shouldn't we say drifter??) to follow a certain path?

massumi jabs at the practice of semiotics and representation, that signs are not just based on deconstructed linguistic/cultural/cognitive meanings, but on their location, when they stop. a trash bag has a totally different signified meaning based on its location. i guess that's obvious, but something to keep in mind


Also, cool article, cool blog. reminded me of the eye-surveillance stuff.

life

death

newer realism

So as I've been making these transparent collages on photoshop using internet ads (A post with a few of them is coming soon) I was reminded of the art movement in France in the '60s called Nouveau Realisme, a faction of which was artists making decollages using torn pieces of street advertisements.

(In the pieces I've made the opacity of the ads is all very low so they are all sort of visible and invisible/unreadable/transparent at the same time, which seems like an appropriate progression from the technique of Nouveau Realists like Jacques de la Villegle and Raymond Hains (above).) Anyway, I'll have more to say about my stuff when I put it up but this line of research reminded me of the artist Arman who was also in this group but made mostly sculptures and collections of objects. (He also did stuff like make "paintings" using paintbrushes like this version of Van Gogh's Starry Night.)

In response to Yves Klein's works centered on the concept of Le Vide, e.g.

...Arman filled a gallery with garbage, calling it Le Plein (basically, "The Full"):

From this, then, came a series called Poubelles which were large glass boxes with collections of junk (some "garbage" some not) in them. The decollages are more directly related to what I'm making now but the Poubelles seems like a perfect predecessor to something we could/should make, Adrian.

Anyway, that's where my head's at right now. Let me know what this stuff does for you guys.

P.S. Google "trash" and you get a map of your city with lots of destinations.

P.P.S. Thought I'd give this a shot; efforts thwarted though. How appropriate (click to enlarge):



PPPS#!&: Lizzie check out this crazy ish! EYE TRACKING. Relates to our computer installation/multi-feed video surveillance ideas right??

vortex/invisibility/navigation ideas convo

Adrian: okay well the idea is like you move around the city drifting instead of being ordered

the thing about the garbage patchis that it just driftsandEITHERit gets stuck in the vortexwhich is where most of those rubber duckies are, actuallyorit hits somethinga beacha beach that sticks out into the vortex
me: mmhm
Adrian: so land is either created or destroyedbasically
me: waitwhich is which
Adrian: i dunno!i haven't figured out a thesis or anythingbut i think the connection is definitely there
me: like, you could say land is created by trash being beached or that it's destroying the beach?
Adrian: okay soi don't know exactlybecause i still need to read a bitbutthe garbage patch starts and ends at the drifti have a lot more to say about the patch toobecause it exists even less than i thought it did
me: how so?
Adrian: wellbasically: its not really in the vortexesits in a space that connects these two larger cortexesmost of it is between a couple feet below water and 100 ft under waterANDit varies every yeardue to weatherbetween these certain latitudes
me: **** so its even more impossible to see or track
Adrian: over 1,000 milesin el nino years it gets even more ****** up
me: in what way
Adrian: well one year it could be at at 37 N. and the next it could be at 53which is 1,000 miles separationand then in el nino the currents go really crazyso it could get pushed in a completely different directionbasically it drifts like mad, sort of in circlesso basically
me: who's tracking it exactly?and how?
Adrian: some homies
me: ah
Adrian: i'll hook you up with this videocheck this out too:http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/05/
me: this rules
Adrian: yeahbut check it outone of the only ways they can actually track surface currentsis with these huge trash spillsone of them was with 80,000 nike shoes
me: whattttt
****

Adrian: yeah
me: so they act as like buoys
Adrian: basically
me: actually helping scientists in a way
that's a whole new dimension
Adrian: exactlyANDsome beaches have left shoes and SOME have rightbecause of they way they float
me: no way.
Adrian: !!!
me: hahaahahahahhhh *******
Adrian: totally ******* seriouscheck out this video its awesomehttp://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/video/116-flotsam_found.html
me: i thought you were joking about the ducks**************
Adrian: no manthe ducks were revolutionaryso some of them end up in scotlandbut the majorityare in the vortex
me: tough break scotland
Adrian: 1,000 at auctionno joke
me: what?

Adrian: if you find one of the original ducks it's worth mad money you know whats funny i think the nike shoes float cuz they have air in themok but start thinking about this drift ****i should really talk to lizzie because it has tons to do with navigationbut yeahthe only way we can 'see' the garbage is sort of likewhen we stick our hand into the water and try to pull out whatever we canand no matter what it's just....randomtrashalso: wormholebecause once something goes into 'vortex'it might not come out for 50 years and on the other side of the world