https://brianhouse.net/works/joyride/

I found the project Joyride, created by Brian House, especially interesting and also humorous. The ability for the artist to be able to determine the path of a stolen phone emphasizes the dystopian implications behind pieces of advanced technology: with a smartphone at hand, anyone’s location is trackable. At the same time, the reenactment of the thief’s journey is humorous in that it seems to mock the thief in that even though they have stolen the phone, everything is still under control and surveillance. The fact that the project was done through google map street view furthers the profound control and web of information on the internet.

Natural Process

Link

Natural Process is an installation that translates the Google search engine homepage to a painting, and then takes the painting back to digital media through webcam. The painting was purchased by Google.

I find it really interesting because it blurred the boundary between digital media and physical media. It also makes the Google homepage unfunctional, forcing the audiences to notice the design of the page, which is usually overlooked.

Shiftspace: A browser extension (by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv, ShiftSpace) that enables collaboratively annotating, editing and shifting the web.

Comments:

• What is it: Shiftspace, like my project, was inspired by the control over how users interact on the Internet. In 2007, the Shiftspace team managed to implement 4 different styles of interaction on the meta-layer created by Shiftspace. Users can put “Notes”, highlight text, replace images, and even edit the source code of a website collaboratively. The project didn’t last till today. In fact, their official demo page and website are not accessible.
• Good: When I came up with the idea of my project, I had a sense that someone must already made something that enables web-space-specific comments. Here it is: a chrome extension made just for that. Users can develop new plugins for Shiftspace. User can make a “shift” that connect other pages of the website, forming a network of links. The shifts show some relevent information such as the time when something is posted. The idea can be revolutionary, it is worth thinking about why such a promising project failed eventually.
• Bad: The interface is not very convenient as users had to press SHIFT and SPACE and then click one of the buttons to use it. The big note can cover important contents of the webpage (they should be made transparent when the cursor is near). The image-swap and sourcecode edit is too invasive and will eventually make users confused about whether it is the original content of the website. The extension does not intend to store any information about the author of the comments, which disables making personal connections between website commenters.
• Inspirations: There are of course many challenges to this idea. The most important one is how can one know the two website links are pointing to the same content. Taking the Youtube link, for example, two distinct videos are stored under a query ?v=xxxxxx of video id, but other queries are about giving Youtube metadata. We would like two notes about the same video, although browsed in slightly different url, to appear together. It is challenging to achieve this. Other problems involve the long-tail distribution of visitors. How do you manage comments on https://www.google.com the main page? How do you balance comments with original content? A seemingly simple extension would take a lot of effort to make.

PSYCHO NYMPH EXILE

Website | CG-poem | Hyper Poem

The Psycho Nymph Exile CG-poem project is part of a larger trilogy of narratives ranging from books to sticker sets. Its focus is on telling the story of trauma in multiple medias. The CG-poem is an interactive 3D world that lets the user choose their path through the story. I found this interesting because of the great visuals and deep meaning. I also liked how the visuals matched with the text on screen to create an immersive experience. The Hyper Poem is an interactive poem on the web browser. Clicking words triggers different effects, either revealing more text of the poem or resetting the experience with a metaphoric meaning. I thought that traversing through the different paths was enjoyable and that I wanted to spend more time to uncover easter eggs or secret interactions I had not discovered yet.

Starry Night, ALEX GALLOWAY, MARK TRIBE, AND MARTIN WATTENBERG  (1999)

https://anthology.rhizome.org/starrynight

Starry Night is a visualization and navigation tool for Rhizome’s email discussion archive, where emails are represented as stars whose brightness corresponds to how often they’re accessed. Stars are connected into constellations based on shared keywords.

Representing communication as a graph is not a hugely unexpected idea, but I am such a sucker for diagramming intimate thoughts and interpersonal exchanges. By connecting different artists’ thoughts, it adds a communal wholeness to the archive, and representing it as constellations similarly encourages reflection on varying distances and times close and far. It reminds me of commonplace books and a little experiment I did some years ago to explore and find connections among the notes I write to myself.