First Day Back
Now that I’m back home and well rested, I started my work by tackling my list of suggestions and resources recommended to me over the residency, I sorted them all out and listed them by priority. After that, I started watching/viewing the high priority items and making notes on my thoughts/key points on them.
First on my list I watched the following:
Unfortunately the movie itself has vanished from the internet and remains inaccessible.
I also watched some old lectures from VCFA out of curiosity:
David and Sereinas Lecture from 2016 on Studio HAMMERS work
Graphic Authorship by Ian Lynam (2021)
Teaching in a Time of Crisis by Natalia (2021)
As I turned in for the day, I watched and episode of Chef’s Table with my girlfriend. The episode was on the Argentinian chef Francis Mallmann.
A lot of the Metahaven Sprawl Project struck me with an uncanny, eerie sense of location, where the glitching and found footage aesthetic felt anxiety inducing. It reminded me due to the Russian voice over and found footage style of the game Atomic Heart (2023), a game about a Soviet Union era nation that was incorporating AI and robotics into its countries lifestyle, but things go horribly wrong and you explore old soviet bunkers where human testing and horrors were created. The found footage aesthetic, old soviet era music, and mixture of horror and the unknown was used as a marketing campaign where a YouTube channel pretended to be “leaking” the videos of the game in development out with no context. It made for a appeal that captivated those interested into wanting to search and find more, as well as theorize what was happening in the short and often blurry clips.
Aside from that immediate thought, I was really interested in the last few parts where they talked about the incorporation of augmented reality and the IPU (Internet Party of Ukraine), it made me think a lot about how a political party can use distraction as a form of deception to keep the public eye off of something they are doing. Similar to the news in America like CNN and FOX, the medias attention span for an issue is only a week long and then they move on to the next “scoop”, they rarely tell things with the full truth, instead employing “half-truths” to keep the people watching aligning with their own personal biases, often with a scent of malicious intent.
The art of The Sprawl, from what I saw, used a lot of filters and glitching effects which in my immediate thought looked similar to ad-popups or overlays over the video, which I interpreted as a commentary on how attention-deficit the population has grown (Think kids watching subway surfer or dopamine videos side by side with stories or explanations on Tik-Tok because if people do not incorporate that, people will often switch off the video immediately.) as well as how intrusive corporations have gotten to try to use every metric inch of space as an advertisement.
On Twitter today I saw that Youtube is actively attempting to throttle a persons performance on their computer if they have an Adblocker installed, by sending packets filled with data to the router to overload the network and cause Youtube as well as chrome to slow down and use more resources to run on your pc. This is a huge breach of privacy and law (think of the ethical case towards how they even “Know” we have an Adblocker installed in the first), but also impossible to counter, because although it is illegal, we have no power to stop it, and the vast majority people are not just going to “give up” Youtube.
Another example I was thinking of relating to this was the ethics and idea of advertisements within virtual reality. In a system that is capable of tracking you eyes, learning your speech, and scanning your face, corporations gain more information on exactly what, how, and when you are looking at an object, person, anything. The app “Moviepass” used this feature to enable it so that if you looked away from an advertisement on your phone, the ad would pause, forcing you to look and drive your attention towards that ad until it was gone. This can grow even more scary in the lens of a virtual reality headset, due to it having full control of everything you see.
For the lectures, I mostly watched the David and Sereina lecture to get more of an idea of what they do, however I did have some nice takeaways from it that I thought were useful. Within David and Sereinas lecture, something that resonated a lot with me is the idea of we, as those with privilege, are often told we cannot work in styles and modes of design that are not related to our culture and that we can not speak for the occupied, oppressed, or marginalized communities and cultures we ourselves are not part of.
They also mention that people with privilege's making choices for others can times air in the direction of patronizing When asked why the magazine was printed in Europe rather than supporting local printers, the artists themselves who were presented asked whether it would they themselves or the people who view the magazine would want it to be printed cheaply.
The moral here is that sometimes we try to speak for those in underprivileged positions as if we know better for them, which is the wrong direction to go when approaching each other as designers. We must treat each other as equals to make progress.
My girlfriend and I started watching Chef’s table before residency, and we occasionally sit down to watch an episode or two. I always find the show so relatable to my position in life. This episode centered on a Argentinian born man who mastered and loved French cuisine, only to give it up and go back to what he truly loved to do. He talked about how he’s had to make many tough choices in his life, as well as losing friends over the years due to growing apart and moving away.
I feel that will happen to us eventually, as we plan to move to another country and leave America, but how will I take it and where will I be? The future is always so uncertain, so I can only guess.
At my current position, I feel that I want to get my bearings and gather more content and read a little more before diving into the design side of things.
