in which i do a series of things

This is the piece that was in the CCAC's Thunderdome show. I'm actually happy with it, which I didn't think I would be. It took me most of the summer to come to this point. Originally it was a video dealing both with deliberate performance and with returning the gaze of the viewer, but it didn't mesh the way I'd hoped. I think I'm going to make a second video dealing with gaze, and maybe they can be shown together if I ever show this again.

The quote that sums up my intent for this video better than any artist statement I could come up with so far goes, "Our bodies are occupied territories. Perhaps the ultimate goal of performance, especially if you are a woman, gay or a person “of color,” is to decolonize our bodies; and make these decolonizing mechanisms apparent to our audience in the hope that they will get inspired to do the same with their own." (Guillermo Gómez-Peña “In Defense of Performance Art” )

Also, originally I wanted to call this "I'm not Dutch," but I don't know if anyone would get the joke.

Apropos nothing, this has been my top/ most-enjoyable time-waster this week: SCP. (Hint: go to the full experiment log.)

GIIIIFS

I'm in the process of producing more gifs. I use DAAP's computer lab to make them in large batches, however, so while you're waiting (on the edge of your seat, I know) for new ones to appear, here are some stills from the latest shoots I've done.

The fully animated gifs will be on my tumblr within the next week.

Liveblogging the Internet part 2

Spastic clicking mirrors my mental state this week. Open tabs at this very second: (in class, Internet Art, hi Jordan!): Sarah Leavitt Dot Com (she does comics), ephemerafriends on Etsy (watercolors of t-shirts on hangers, sweet jesus I want one), my UC email, Google+, Google music (it works so much better than soundcloud, huzzah!), Scratch Project Buttons (Danielle's project that we just critiqued), and this. The Blogger new post box. Thing.

Emails I have sent today: my submission to the Kindlin Quarterly. Emails I will send today: one to David, about the Hetero-Types show, and one to the BearCast web director guy, with my article.

People I have chatted with today: my dad, about UC admissions, and Quinn, about his job. I have also called the admissions office through my computer, which shouldn't blow my mind but kind of does. Also Christina, who is in Spain.

http://jennifer-chan.com/

As I recently stated in my english paper about tumblr, the internet has a seamy, dark underbelly of porn and fetishes, and Jennifer Chan seems to dig it all out and slather on some feminist rhetoric. I like it. She's intense.

http://mitchtrale.com/

I like his main page. I feel like there should be a hamster running in it though.

Sierpinski triangles! Makes me think of YouTube vlogger ViHart.

http://proofmathisbeautiful.tumblr.com/

Hell to the yes. Wish my math classes in high school had been better, so I could absorb more of this stuff.

Interneting while trying to record yourself interneting gets really cyclical, as Jordan pointed out. I'm typing about what I'm typing about what I'm typing about. I don't know if this is effective at all. I'm thinking about what I'm thinking about what I'm thinking. Urgh.

Live-blogging the Internet

http://www.jaakkopallasvuo.com/screentest.html

This is what I am watching. I am sitting at Taza coffeehouse with my headphones in and I'm half hearing the smooth British female voice and half listening to the two older men at the window table, one gesturing and talking about "an artsy mom" which strikes me as sexist but maybe it's simply out of context.

I notice Martin Kohout's name in the credits of the film. We had a lecture by him today, I found I could follow almost all of it, to my surprise. I surprise myself often, with things I remember and know and do. I don't mean to sound pretentious at all, I simply don't think I know something, and then all of a sudden I do.

I guess it's worse when I think I DO know something and I then I don't.

I click on another link on Jaakko Pallasvuo's site. It takes me to pictures of a gallery show, and this quote, "I read into things: haircuts as language, gestures and objects as language. Language as language, too. I'm interested in social dynamics. Subtle changes in room-size atmospheres."

His work is interesting to me. It deals with several things I like to think about. I wonder if he's Finnish--what else could he be with a name like that? Maybe I'll write to him. What about, though, I don't really know.

Would you look at that, Nicholas O'Brien is on this site. I have seen this video, on Nicholas' own YouTube channel. It is all at once more strange and makes more sense in this context, next to the video by Jake Diebeler.

The speakers here are playing Our Cat Philip. I saw them when they played here. I liked them better live, which is rare for me. I really prefer recorded music to live, in general. I explained it to my sister in this way: the music is a film strip. When it is presented to you live, you experience it one frame at a time--the strip of music is in contact with you only one moment at a time. In order to experience each frame, you must forget the one before it. When you listen to a song though headphones, you can see the whole strip, experience a bigger chunk of it at a time. When I find a song I like, I listen to it obsessively, playing it over and over. Eventually I can sing along, I can anticipate the good parts--I can see the whole film strip, the structure and the linear quality of it.

"6. The Acknowledgement That This Is Boring Doesn't Make It Any Less Boring
I asked someone to stand still and hold a sign saying I KNOW THIS IS BORING for one minute."

Okay, yeah, that's great. I need to write to this guy.

http://www.booooooom.com/2011/11/07/first-aid-kit-the-lions-roar-music-video/

I have kept this link open for three days because I don't want to lose it but then again I do not want to bookmark it because even though it will be in my bookmarks I will forget about it and all I REALLY want to do is to keep the doorway to that song and that video open as long as I can.

There are two girls singing and four playing drums and I notice that there are no men in this video, which shouldn't strike me but does. Damn you, patriarchy.

I've tried talking feminism and genderqueer with my sister, but explaining third-gender pronouns to anyone is awkward. "Zhe" and "hir" are awkward. I try my best to use them when they apply. They taste strange on the tongue.

Is the visual of the vintage suitcase at the bottom of the lake too hipster, or just hipster enough to be relevant? Music videos both intrigue me and frustrate me. Often they have half-formed narratives woven into the song and I want more, a continuation or closure or something. But asking the Internet for closure is like asking a cat to do, well, anything. It'll refuse simply because it is not in its nature to comply.

In between videos I hear the ESL group chattering and laughing. I turn to iTunes. Massive Attack. Not my favorite band but it's in my shuffle so here it goes. Still reading Jaakko, I start thinking about Ryan Mulligan, comparing my thesis work to poetry, breathing room and all that. I wonder if this i meant to be poetry. Does it matter? I've stopped writing poetry. It's easy to start writing and then hard to stop.

Ryan also asked me about grad school. Oh god don't ask me about grad school. Jordan asked me about money. Oh god don't ask me about money. I need time I don't have time jesus christ I should be doing comics and Japanese and returning library books and mailing Netflix envelopes and I skipped English today, even though I did the reading. That class makes me happy, it is easy. That class makes me sad, it skims along the surface of things I want to dig into, now that I know I can.

A video at the end of all that writing, a plastic curtain billowing in front of a window, you can see the squares of light moving on it. It is a delicate video, quiet. It clashes with the sound of the barista stacking cups.

Here, watch it:


Incomplete Descriptions from Jaakko Pallasvuo on Vimeo.

Oh my god he does comics. I'm done. I wish we'd had more time in class for artist presentations lately, I've found so many good ones. Another one I found was Uno Moralez, who does bitmap comics and gifs.

I like Martin Kohout's bio on his about page. I wish I could do the same sort of thing without being classified as a smartass. I feel like there's a different expectation for female artists when it comes to that sort of thing. And it cuts both ways. I love The Pervocracy's Cosmocking series--she covers why Cosmo's presentation of females is disturbing and wrong, but why Cosmo's presentation of men is also problematic.

Now that The Pervocracy is open I'm going to end up reading it until my hot chocolate has gone cold (oh wait that's already happened nevermind) so I'll end this live-blogging thing for now. Might come back and do some more later.

What I did on the Net today: personas

So, I've been thinking.

My last Net Art project resulted in this: mot-ljuset-le.tumblr.com. Before that, I was doing YouTube video performances (like the Pony response video). I have my main blog, mid-atlantic ridge, and one for reblogs, ebolazaire. I have a facebook page. I have a photobucket. I have a livejournal and a deviantart, both mostly inactive.

Somewhere in there, there's a sort of Internet-version of myself, which is quite like me, but not wholly so. It's an inadvertent Internet persona, the version of myself that exists on the Internet, that may be a little more eloquent than the person sitting at the keyboard, that may be a bit more raucous and raunchy than the person who presents in the classroom. I make decisions on the Internet, not to build this Internet persona, but simply to react to whatever virtual situation has presented itself. Comments and writing and reblogs are generally automatic--I am not representing anyone but myself (or, at least, my Internet-self), why would I think about it too hard?

So... what if I DID think about it? What if I went about creating an Internet persona totally from scratch? It's like building a character in a story, in a totally disjointed way. There's no narrative, just an entire person to create, to be viewed through a screen. Nothing is explained, there's just photos and brief captions and "likes" and reblogs. When you get on the Internet, you don't go about laying out your life's story on every website--you simply jump in, like a stage scene, starting from the middle. So what if I decided to simply start monitoring everything I did on the Internet, on certain websites, to appear to be anyone other than the person I am now? It would have to be exhaustive in order to be convincing. I would have to create a person totally from scratch, in order to act like him/ her/ hir on the Internet.

I'm not sure I could do it. I am not a good actor--I am too firmly planted within my own head. I can imitate and follow a script--pure creation is a different story.

Impersonation is possible, but only if I could find someone to switch Internet-bodies with (like in that old Goosebumps story where the guy switches bodies with a bee). Jeremy Bailey mentioned in his lecture doing a similar thing with Petra Cortright, I think... but that was only on facebook. It involves a massive amount of trust, not to mention feeling comfortable with baring very private details of your Internet life with someone. And I'm going to go right ahead and say that I'm not that close to anyone, not even my sister or my boyfriend. I could consider letting someone into my facebook account, maybe, but that's mostly because what I have on facebook is not very sensitive. Other venues of the Internet are a different story.

I don't know if I'll end up doing this, at least not immediately. It will take massive amounts of Interneting, which I simply do not have time for right now. Perhaps in the future I will have the time to build a whole new being out of a few Internet profiles.

Video Performance

I know I've mentioned Chris Collins before, and I probably posted this video...

But since I am totally out of ideas for other video performance pieces, I figured I'd make the one I'd been thinking about doing for a while. Here you go, and you're welcome.

I am totally willing to look ridiculous in the name of art.

So I did the take this lollipop thing...

www.takethislollipop.com

And while it was a little laughable to me, since most of what I post on facebook is comics, my profile picture isn't even of me, and I'm very careful to monitor what photos I'm tagged in, I feel like it would be intensely creepy to someone who posts tons of photos, possibly very personal ones, on facebook.

Check it out. It's not going to jump out and scream at you, I promise... but it might creep you out a little bit.

Art updates etc

Things I have been working on recently:

-a comic called Satin Passion, which is the remains of my failed 24-hour-comics endeavors (and which I work on when I have down time between classes, or something... it won't be done for a while, in other words)
-my 12-page comic for comics independent study, which will be autobiographical in nature
-work for my internet art class (in this case, gifs, which can be seen here... and my second project will involve YouTube videos and possibly helium-voice... and of course the What I Did on the Net Today posts)

Things I haven't been working on recently but are still in progress and that I'll return to eventually, sometime:

-my YouTube stills
-the small hand-bound non-sequitur sketchbook things I was doing for advanced drawing spring quarter
-writing and poetry

Things I am doing constantly:

-sketchbook stuff
-taking pictures with my cell phone, since it's the handiest camera I have

What I did on the Net today... so far.

Since I just woke up (and consequently slept through a Japanese test, heh), I've only had time to check my email, facebook, google plus, and tumblr (briefly). I'm currently flipping through all the pages of fyeahartnewbieowl.tumblr.com, and finding (happily) that I stopped doing most of the things mentioned in Junior High.

I did gchat with my dad (who is in Sweden) and my boyfriend (who is at work and bored). In English class last week, I heard one of the sophomore girls sitting behind me talk about how "nerdy" or "geeky" it was to chat on gchat, and I really wanted to turn around and ask her why. Instead, I opened my laptop and g-chatted with my boyfriend until the professor came in. How is gchat nerdier than facebook chat? What are the ranking hierarchies of nerdiness in chat programs? Where does AOL and chatroulette fall on the scale? Interesting. Maybe I'll make an online survey and ask people to rank chat programs from nerdy to totally hip.

Also, my English class (to quote Jillian Tamaki's Skim) is a goldfish tank of stupid.

What I did on the Net today

As this is a usual schoolday, my Net time so far has been limited. Before English I scrolled through tumblr on my iPod Touch, but didn't get very far. Since class was canceled after we turned in our papers, I ran an errand and came back home to scroll further through tumblr while making soup for lunch. The soup was disappointing but tumblr delivered, as always. Someday I'll do an entry on tumblr specifically, but since that is a Nippert-stadium-sized can of worms, I'll leave it for now. Suffice to say, tumblr delivered as usual.

Since then I've quickly cleared out my deviantart watch list (rolling my eyes and wondering why I follow most of these artists but not actively doing anything to un-watch them), checked my email, checked my facebook (again, quickly attending to notifications and getting the hell out of there), and scanned the Swedish tabloid site Aftonbladet since my dad sent me a link to some article about a dog defending its wounded friend (heart-wrenching, but the effect is spoiled somewhat by pop-ups and blaring ads).

I'm in Internet Art class currently and we've been talking about artists: Duncan Alexander, Alain Barthelemy, jodi.org and Jaime Martinez... as well as threeframes and if we don't, remember me.

Also, watching this video, which I have posted before but is still hilarious--it led us to this site, which reminds me of a video blogger I found when working on my screenshot project earlier in the year. It was a girl in her middle/ late teens making videos to Ke$ha songs that were clearly meant to be sexy and provocative but just came across as sort of sad and desperate--the videos are set in what looks like her grandmother's house, and she's trying so hard to be sexy but she's small and sort of childlike still and it's almost uncomfortable to watch.

I digress. I'll probably spend more time on tumblr before the day is out, and sort through my usual rounds of webcomics. But that's what I've been doing on the Net today.

What I did on the Net today-- ancient history edition

Continuing my previous experiment, and inspired by Robert Lorayn.

My earliest Internet experiences must have been such games as Poke the Bunny and Smack the Monkey on iambored.com (or the 1999-2000 equivalent). I looked up what sex was, and the Internet gave me an overwhelming answer (and my parents gave me firewalls/ parental controls). I had a neopets account, mostly to use the Bubble Shooter game. My four or five close friends shared a blog (though we didn't use that word, it was a diary) in the 5th grade, and my best friend and I "hacked" it by posting comments "anonymously," from a boy named Ben. Eventually we confessed, but it was hilarious while it lasted.

In Junior High I got into Runescape and spent hours wandering between mine and smelting forge and anvils, not killing anything (not chickens, not squirrels) and leveling up very slowly. I gave up eventually, possibly upon the discovery of deviantart... and possibly because I never grasped the community aspect of the game. I hated talking to anyone I didn't know (which was more or less everybody), so the game held no human appeal for me. Around this time, too, a friend introduced me to a blog site called CrazyLife upon which I wrote little stupid stories during study hall. Through this I came to Xanga and Livejournal, where I had friends and did write regularly for a time.

In High School, facebook appeared. And for a while I suppose it was magical, pictures and statuses and apps. Here was something unlike anything else my friends had tried to get me to join, Hi5 and all those other, less-successful social networking sites. I also had a long list of youtube videos bookmarked, which functioned as my music base until iTunes was installed.

Then in college came all the required sites, UC email and blackboard and various such things. Endless logins and password changes. I tried to update my online portfolio from deviantart to artician, which is more professional. It is also smaller and less active.

Tumblr. I think I'll save my thoughts on tumblr for another day. Suffice to say, tumblr is the new facebook.

(Further updates in this vein will continue on a separate blog, still to be determined. Stay tuned.)

What I did on the Net today.

(This is a test post for a potential project in my Internet Art class with Jordan Tate--I just want to see if my idea can even be fleshed out. So, um. Bear with me.)

Since this morning I had work at the writing drop-in center, the first thing I did on the internet was frantically check both my emails--the UC outlook email and my personal gmail. I flagged one email as important--from David Rosenthal, talking about an upcoming show at Prairie Gallery. He wanted me to contact engineering professor Rosales about the electron microscope tour we're arranging. I figured I'd get to it later, maybe between classes.

Then I ran to work where I logged in to eTutoring.org and waited for any student questions or submitted papers to pop up (or for a student to drop in). None of these things came to pass, so I spent two hours refreshing the page, trying to get YouTube to play Pachelbel's Canon without stopping repeatedly (and failing), and reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. I used Dictionary.com to look up works like "perseverating" (which my firefox dictionary flags as misspelled, suggesting "persevering" instead) and "obtunding" (also marked misspelled).

Then until 8 pm I was not on the Internet, classes and rehearsals and grocery shopping being necessary activites.

When I got home I tried to open the two tabs I had opened in the morning, but firefox crashed and refused to open. I opened safari instead and checked my emails again, noting that no one I wanted to talk to was on gchat. I skimmed my googlereader subscriptions. Then I progressed to facebook, where I had three friend requests, a message, and two notifications waiting for me. I dealt with the requests and left quickly in favor of tumblr--the new facebook layout is just too much for me to handle. At this point I was making dinner and scrolling, occasionally opening articles in a new tab or liking/ reblogging posts of interest--ones about Occupy Wall St, and bullying, and feminism. Eventually I decided to try firefox again, since all my webcomic bookmarks are saved there, and this time it cooperated. I opened tumblr again in one tab and in another surfed through my various webcomics--girls with slingshots, sinfest, multiplex, the homepage of julia wertz, teahouse, so far apart, octopus pie, johnny wander--looking for updates. I noted that some webcomic artists are clearly more committed to the regular creation of panels than others. I also noted that since there's several big conventions going on at the moment, I should probably cut them some slack.

For a while after looking through the comics I sat and stared at the screen and felt like the Internet is such a vast place and all I'm seeing is a tiny labyrinthine corner of it (and I'm destined never to escape).

I've been flipping between various comics, tumblr, and links in my "BRILLIANT" bookmarks folder since then, diligently procrastinating my English reading. In particular, I've been admiring the work of Megan Amram, twitter comedian and Glee enthusiast. I posted her audition video on the Internet Art google+ stream. At some point I must have visited the class calendar for Internet Art, because there's a half-read pdf open behind this window and it's about net art. In the middle of reading it I had a sort-of idea and realized that if I didn't act on it it would be gone forever. So I opened blogspot and signed in and started writing this post. And that is what I did on the Net today.

Collaboration

So on Thursday internet artist Chris Collins came to DAAP to lead a collaborative workshop and to give a lecture. I attended both. For the workshop we used google sketchup to create virtual sculptures (mine is the gigantic pink thing with the cat head in the back):

Which we then sent to Chris to insert into a program called Unity which is used to create virtual spaces within games. While he was doing that, we created two google draw documents: one for the floor, and one for the sky. And we recorded some audio. I'm not going to tell you what song we sang, I'll leave that to you to figure out. The result is a virtual sculpture garden, complete with setting and ambiance. The download is available here for both PC and Mac.

A group of us went to lunch afterwards, and getting to sit around, eat sushi, and hear Chris describe his resume to Jordan Tate (who was to introduce him at the lecture later) was pretty sweet.

At the lecture Chris went through his work, all of which can be found here. I think I like this one best:

Just for the sheer ridiculousness. The Lion King one is pretty fantastic, too.

Click on all the links I've provided, each one leads to something amazing, I promise.

This might be the best thing I've seen all day

Goggles. You need firefox or chrome to use it, but... now you can DRAW on people's webpages! Have at it!