Author: marimonda

marimonda – CriticalInterface

I made the mistake of reading thoroughly through each of the axioms and the small prompts for each of them, which made it incredibly difficult in finding one single quote to expand on.

At last, I chose this one:

La interfaz acumula trazas: rastros y restos de todos los (ag)entes que confluyen en ella

“Ask someone you trust to collect all traces stored on his/her computer and do the same. Exchange files and describe a character that fits this information. Do the same with someone you don’t know”

This specific proposition is incredibly powerful to me because it has a certain applicability to the sort of questions I have been asking myself recently about what it means to be a person in a world that has surveillance so thoroughly ingrained in our day to day life. Today, in between going through this reading, I came across this tweet  and it really put into perspective just how pervasive the digital tracking and profiling of our identities comes into play. For one, many of our interactions with day to day websites will have some sort of trackers or ad trackers that either use scripts of code or literal images to profile your device for the sake of identifying you as a potential user or consumer. In a way, it is that “dystopian” future we often spoke about, where mass surveillance dominates our lives, and I often wonder how we look on the other side of the information conglomerates that own our interactions with the digital world. I don’t find this scary at all. How much of me as a person has become readily accessible and summarizable by the way my system interprets the pixels of an image? Is this bad? Should I revel in this and make myself as exposable as I can be or use only burner phones for the rest of my life? The idea of having an identity constructed by a set of identifiers that can be accessed in a sort of abstract way is something I have been considering, and I think with this I think a lot about who people become on the other side.

marimonda – LookingOutwards03

Hannah Perner-Wilson, high/low tech wearables and textiles hacker

Choosing a piece from Hannah Perner-Wilson’s repertoire was really difficult because I think she makes some really interesting work. One of the articles linked mentioned the propensity of gloves as an area of study for physical computists(?) and I saw that reflected in her work in a really fun way but I ended up choosing this really simple project and more “functional” project.

I find this piece of work incredibly interesting for three questions/points of explorations it proposes for me: interface, surveillance and ownership.

So I did the readings in a different order, and I read the manifesto first and I think a lot about the reasons we as humans often have a little bit of nostalgia towards analog technology that didn’t have as many augmentative agents as we do now, it also didn’t have as complicated and developed forms of tracking us. It wasn’t an absorbing mode of social media. And what fascinates me about this project is the turning of this sort of digital horror to a self made system. It is interesting to me, reading her process in trying to make this phone functional for her and detailing the many interface problems it presents.

It’s functional, but not perfectly so. It’s inconvenient, but in the way that’s only noticeable through the passage of time and the development of new technologies and thorough interface agents.

 

marimonda – exercises

code linked to each image!(resized for convenience, all images (but task 8) are 600 x 600).

HAS BEEN FIXED^^^^     

These aren’t great images (They work fine!)! But here’s a little doodle I did with another version of task 14!

Task 15 will show the red line after pressing ‘A’ or ‘a’, to indicate when the user is done drawing lines, after that it will reset the canvas:

Butt Generator! 18. Butt Generator

Plus some extras images I liked:

marimonda – Clock

8:24

LINK TO PROJECT

This was an experience for me to make, as I went through hundreds of testimonies of victims (or their families) who suffered from the violence from the Colombian military, to the ELN, to the different paramilitary groups, to the FARC and female victims of assault through the different periods of armed conflict. I have done a lot of projects recently on the idea of constructing archives and stories, and something that has been on my mind a lot recently is the lived experiences of victims and the numerical definitions of massacre and collective trauma. So in this project, I created a clock that through the period of ten minutes, displays a unique version of these stories. To be able to view this clock, the left-most side displays the current minute represented by the number of words, the middle column represents the ten’s place digit of the seconds (thus it changes every 10 seconds) and the rightmost column represents the one’s digit.

The hardest part of this piece was trying to find a way of approaching this sensitive topic in a proper and respectful way, I translated a lot of the anecdotes at first quite literally, but many of the stories were violent and incredibly difficult to digest. There is also often a difficulty in trying to describe the violence that exists in Latin America without make it the defining quality of these nations. It often feels like as a Colombian, so many of our conversations are focused on avoiding the armed conflict as a topic, it felt uncomfortable to make this piece but I still made it because it is a very real struggle for many, and for those who live it every day through memories.

4:10-419

10:00

here is an earlier revision! CW: More explicit mentions of sexual assault and violence. 

 

NOTES:

(CW: Mentions of violence)

 

EDIT: 9/17/2020

I edited the text to be slightly bigger, and added more variation to the statements so that it doesn’t feel as repetitive!

marimonda – timekeeping

I really enjoyed the readings and videos for this week, I actually ended up watching most of Dr. Donna Caroll’s video and the part that really struck with me of her video was her description of the disruptive nature of Roman time-keeping and how time developed this system of arbitrary months, in part due to cultural pressures. I think this video specifically (though Johanna Drucker and lepw76 go into this as well) made me consider the relationship between ‘accuracy’ and culture . As humans we often have this drive to aspire for accuracy (through patterns we observe, especially in the case of yearly calendars) while imposing a vision of what we believe reality is (in terms of mythos, counting systems, creation), and how this enhances or builds into the narratives we make.

marimonda – meander

Reading this was really insightful in the way that it put into formal, real words a lot of the ideas I was having when creating my map assignment. That generation of randomness of streets and rivers is something that I tried to simply emulate using randomness and it took me some time to realize that it isn’t enough to just create random lines starting from a center but actually have multiple points (or in the case of rivers, a line) to start paving and building the terrain.

 

marimonda – LivingWallpaper

link to project!

link to the GIF in case the one above breaks!

I had a lot of pain making this, in part because I had issues in trying to figure out what it was that I wanted to make. I went through a lot ideas surrounding type and marimonda masks but I eventually decided in doing something more representational as I approached the prompt. I have been thinking a lot about the internet as a sort of panopticon and the whole bunch of privacy concerns that zoom brings in. So it seemed fitting to do something related to this as the background I’d be wearing on Zoom. In terms of technical elements, I used mainly gradients, blends and and simple trigonometric motion while making my objects loop. In terms of motion specifically, I used Lissajous figures in terms of tracking the movement of the eye and I used the Double-Exponential Sigmoid for the camera movement of the poles! I really liked making the eye specifically, especially since I was able to make it seem like the eye got bigger and smaller by resizing different parts of it. Overall, I really wish I had figured out a better way to shift the mountains (like a motion parallax effect) on the background while maintaining noise and randomness. As it is, the mountains are not moving and are made very simply with noise. My colors are a bit different on my monitor than in other displays so I wish I had taken that into consideration while picking colors.

marimonda – Reading02

This was a really interesting reading to me, for one it focused on the idea of making art that is innovative and revels on defying boundaries, and then the type of art that works on perfecting a type of craft. As an artist this is something that I have been considering a lot lately, maybe not with these terms, but it has been a present question in the ways that I consider my own practice, especially as I start to veer into tech as a subject and medium of exploration. In the few decades, there has been an almost exponential advancement in the way technology is developing, I almost feel like making truly transcendental work in terms of media is almost ephemeral, it’s like we are a point in development where new forms of work and media (and combinations) are incredibly difficult to find. Or rather, making work based on innovation often feels transient.

The article sort of reaches a middle point in the idea of trying to make work that is both First Word and work that is also Last Word, and after all that is the goal? To make art that is subversive and memorable, but also work that challenges the hegemony.

Technology has somewhat distorted our idea of time, new forms of making art are emerging a lot faster, at least what is accepted by the art establishment (and what the definition of art accepts). I saw people argue that the idea of fame and memorability is something that needs to be constantly pushed, as artists we might not often have the opportunity to make a single relevant piece that becomes the talk of centuries, to be remembered there is a push to be constantly relevant as technology develops. I am not sure where I want my art to be, but I do think that I wish that what I make has the ability to be remembered.

marimonda – LookingOutwards-02

“cclchh” by Manolo ide

This piece to me by Manolo ide just was really visually fascinating to me because of the almost topographical nature of the gradient shapes. I really like the almost optical illusion nature of this piece and how it feels almost three dimensional, when I first looked at this I just imagined myself laying down on top of this image. Very nice.

I also found this project by Zach Lieberman that I found really beautiful, I don’t know if it is generative but the way this project plays with typography is gorgeous to me, especially the way the texts organically disintegrates.

marimonda – reading01 ( 10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal Problem )

Kate Compton coined the “10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal Problem” as a way to describe a common issue in generative artwork, differentiation between the different artifacts generated.

It is an interesting problem because it proposes to us the fact that while two objects may be mathematically different, these differences may not be perceivable at all for the user/player.  In general, there will be cases in which different levels of perceptual differentiation are needed when automatically generating objects.

For instance, assume you are trying to make a new race of monster from a set of attributes (some will have a tail, some wont, some will have legs and some might have wings), if you have a large number of varied parts to construct a monster, it is really likely that each monster you get might be completely different, with every single iteration creating a new race of monster.

But this could come with its own set of disadvantages, assuming you want an entire colony of monsters of the same kind, maybe this specific type of monster only has variations in eye color and tooth shape resulting in hundreds of monsters that could look similar but retain individual characteristics at a closer glace. I think in general, intention and context will determine the mutability of the object you are trying to generate and this is something that is at the core of what Kate Compton was trying to describe, you need to know what are the good attributes and the bad attributes (and the memorable attributes!) of what you are trying to accomplish when generating an object.

Using meaningful symbols and identifiable perceptual differences is a great way to avoid the “10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal Problem“, add various degrees of clear mutability when needed (but also know when not to go overboard!).