At the start of this we had a talk from a guest speaker called Sarah Grant. She talked about some extremely interesting concepts which heavily linked to my practice right now. Materiality as both a concept and how it becomes hazy within digital and non visible spaces are all things that I am heavily interested in.
Sarah Grant:
Network as a material
Network as a concept
Network protocol as political landscape
Network as material is intangible and abstract, making it largely untouched. We are constantly swimming in radio signals. Mostly wifi and bluetooth signals (Cellular networks, Internet protocols, all radio waves at different wave lengths).
Materiality refers to the matter in which something is made. Radio waves are electric and magnetic fields. Radio waves are in fact material and should be considered within materialistic tendencies.
A Transmaterial Body (Chelsea Thompton, 2018).
PhotoLink (2019, Jasmine Soltani). – This piece brought some materiality (at least brought it to physicality, making it tangible).
Newstweek (2011, Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev). – The plug socket highjacks network and allows the studio to change the news in an Internet cafe to highlight how vulnerable we are while online.
Network infrastructure as material:
Cuban sneaker nets powered by people due to the lack of open and free cheap internet access within the country.
Physarum Networks – growing network topologies.
Unauthorized SF MOMA Show (2017, Enar de Dios Rodriguez ect.) – Allowing people to have their own solo shows at the SF MOMA online but inhabiting the same space as the actual building, breaking down the physical and digital barriers.
Red Hook Wifi (2012, Alyx Baldwin).
@woolypixel
@RadNetworks
radicalnetworks.org
Host ATP
DNS Mask
Apache (some kind of web server).
Open WRT – illegal to run your own network and liberate data.
RFID Antenas
Here you can see a whole series of documentation of the exhibition which we had on the 25th of February. It shows my two pieces with explanations about both of them displayed in the middle. Also I have included pictures of several other coursemates pieces. I think overall the exhibition was a really large success. It allowed me to see how other people would interact with my pieces without any precognition on what it was about or how to operate it. It also allowed me to practice displaying work in a manner which feels finished and presentable. Although I had done this before, working within these time and spacial constraints was definitely useful for my work going forward.
Praise the Material
Materiality within the modern world is something which has become completely normalised. Through reproduction, we duplicate the contents of our physical space. Praise the Material aims to question our faith in objects satirically. Bring forward that which you rely upon most, placing it at the centre of the table. The ceremony of your materiality presented to you, digitally intertwined.
Place objects on the centre of the alter behind the curtain to begin the ceremony
Portraits of the Machine
Our obsession with objects has always seemed so confined to the physical space we inhabit. But in actuality, it has also infected our digital and mental space in much less visible ways. These images are machine generated, created through the use of machine learning models trained on self portrait photography and objects within paintings. The machine then choses how to express these to you, taking on expression of its own, feeding off the materialistic images it is given.
oogbrain.com 