I studied film in my undergrad at Columbia, and only towards the end of my years did I start experimenting with other mediums of expression. I took a performance art class with Tamar Ettun. Our assignments spanned more than performance—one was to take inspiration from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, and then create a performance book with instructions for the reader to perform. I created something that resembled net art, or at least was heavily inspired by it. The site was a little playground, with a mix of video, audio, a broken elizabot.js chat bot, buttons, and so on. I wanted to have the user perform without needing to be told to—to simply want to perform and to know exactly how. As someone born in 2001, I found that the internet was formative to the way I think. Before the sort of dumbing down of our top frequented sites (nowadays I would venture to guess that 90% of one’s online time is spent between just a couple of applications), I found the internet to be a treasure trove of discovery. There were numbers of geocities sites with varying personalities, and a variety of interactive sites that toed the line between “just a cool site” and “genius art project.”
I think the draw for me is and always has been interactivity. The site in front of you is not just a passive experience. I wrote my thesis in college about Baudrillard’s conception of hyperreality as applied to the internet. I think there’s something really compelling about how we’ve managed to reinvent existence and interaction—no longer is art just a painting on a wall to be observed. It is more fascinating, perhaps, because the viewer interacts with the work. The art develops because the user allows it to develop by choosing to exist in the space. Perhaps this attitude also comes about because of the coexistence with video games, and on top of that, video games that existed as a strange third-space. I distinctly remember playing Habbo Hotel, which in its essence was purely a social chat room with avatars and custom rooms and so on. The personality I adopted there was so distinct from my own. It allowed me to assume the “body” of something else, to detach myself from reality for a brief moment.
I feel this medium of expression is truly the most natural. Janet Fiderio writes that the nonlinearity of the internet “mimic[s] the brain’s ability to store and retrieve information by referential links for quick and intuitive access.” Hypertextual art is a great example of this, but I think there’s a reason that phones are the one thing we keep on our person at most or all times. Our thoughts don’t operate in the same realm as lived reality, and the internet gives us a chance to make our lived reality mimic our thoughts, to a degree. I’d like to explore this relationship further.
I’m a first-gen Iraqi, and I distinctly remember my parents putting on Al Jazeera during the Arab Spring protests, experiencing it all through photos and videos taken by any regular civilian caught in the demonstrations. This sort of civilian documentation was rather prolific during the Arab Spring. There’s this book, The People Are Not an Image: Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring by Peter Snowden, where the entire argument is that these revolutions were some of the first to rely on this amateur footage being circulated around various platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Our relationship with the internet and hyperspace is, in part, more innate, but it’s also incredibly empowering. It restores a sort of agency, where we’re not just passively experiencing things, but actively participating. It’s a generative and participatory realm.
All this to say, I’m very excited to explore art that considers our complicated relationship with the web. I’d like to create pieces of net art that draw the user in, creating a curiosity and a desire to click on every last hyperlink/button/etc.
P5 Sketch: Martini Man
My experience with the P5 editor is not at all representative of the above. I recently had drinks with a friend who told me about an on-off situationship with a man whom she did not like all that much. This relationship has lasted approximately six years, and it does not appear to be stopping anytime soon. I took some mild inspiration from that interaction and decided to create a quick visualization of what it must be like to be on a “date” with this man. This is sort of a police-sketch based on my friend’s description of the man, who she admits is not particularly enchanting or notable in any manner.
I started by sketching out the piece on a sheet of paper just to get a sense of the essential shapes I’d need to put it together. I then, layer by layer, added each shape until I had a rough outline of this martini drinking man. Most of this was quite simple, though I struggled with figuring out what number to put in for the points—it felt like a guess and check and was fairly time consuming. Something like this would prove to be much easier on Adobe Illustrate or even Microsoft Paint. I then had to do some quick research on transparency so I could make the martini glass look like a proper martini glass.
I also found a little road bump attempting to understand the rotate() command as it didn’t feel entirely intuitive—I expected a center point in the shape and rotation to work around that point, but it appeared the point might’ve been the corner of the canvas instead. Not cool. But, I persisted! Using a healthy sprinkle of push() and pop(), I made it so we had a fairly physically possible olive sitting at the bottom of the martini glass.