Wednesday 16 June 2010

http://www.dareinteractive.com/VAINS/Vains_girls/index.html

idea for satirical demographics

Vains 'Girls site'

Yesterday Lee and I presented our work to the art PhD group. All the questions were really useful = these were my notes, which I dont want to forget:

Who is our audience?

Do we need to target ‘an’ audience?

Is navigation and filtering a proper focus – someone suggested it wasn’t as interesting as a political focus. Or is it a political focus but we didn’t articulate that clearly enough? Somone mentioned ‘hypothesis testing’. I also thought we were doing this. What do you take from that question?

My methodology emphasises including and acknowledging the subjectivity of users (and curators, designers and programmers) as a politically and theoretically informed choice. I thought my Haraway quotes had emphasised that, but perhaps I need to rearticulate this point?

Do we really need to claim we are offering something new, or are we offering another art work in the tradition of other artworks? Should we therefore de-emphasise the ‘intra-active’ etc,
or is it that they don’t understand the significance of our computational structures?

If we do this where does it leave you as a curator?

What about the distributed, mutable and collective evolution of much ‘internet art’, including shareware – how does VAINS fit in with that? Should it stay only on the internet – can we put it in washing machines? Nintendo Wiis, TVs , rolllerskates, soft toys, furniture, supermarkets, trees, carpets etc???? What did this question mean to us – I think it was one of the most relevant and interesting. I’d like to think about this a lot more!!

Useful Cory Arcangel quote:

"Imagine me buying some video equipment off of eBay, turning it on, pressing some random buttons, and then calling whatever comes out my ‘work.’ This mind-set is the spirit of Adult Contemporary. In contrast to some of my older work, which exercised a somewhat subversive use of modern digital tools, the pieces in this show are inspired by the idea of using technology exactly as it was designed, although in a manner best described as ‘non-expert.’ What if the possibility of using a system poorly in an uneducated manner were celebrated? What if I, as an artist, attached my name to the aesthetics of different eras of technology without really bothering to do my homework or even reading the manual (so to speak)?” - Cory Arcangel [10]

Could we distribute some open software – a phone app, an autonomous art criticism machine, auto-art curation engine, etc?? Pod Casts to help people curate their own work, their lives, their stuff, things they think of as art?? Something like that?

Is the current use of emotions etc relevant? Or is it a trap or a pointless game for users, constraining them to pre-defined and not very accurate emotions as one person observed? Should we let them define their own moods or other associations, including dialogues, philosophical observations, political reactions, diatribe, code response etc, etc photos, deconstructions etc?

Should we allow ‘open curation’?


Should we try harder to seduce reluctant users?

We should refine the text free-area….it seems to really irritate people at the moment, partly because I didn’t spend much time on the icons..or layout.


Should we develop a very clear mission statement that we always outline in papers and talks – such as we are non-neutral, exploratory, a site for testing ideas, some of which we know may fail, that we do not envisage a point of closure with any of this but an ongoing set of experiments? That we don’t think we are data mining universal truths or even local truths!! But offering a wide range of investigations? (is that the right word)

Should we show more of the underlying computational structures so people understand the inherent limitations in any system and can see a human hand in the database design etc

What was the most importnat point ?

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