Intermediate conclusions
With this as the last post, it seems that onlineintheworld is about to end. It has been an interesting run. When I conceived of this project, I was very proud of myself. With interesting intellectual bases, manageable technical aspirations and a romantic quality about it, this was the ideal project for me. I cannot exactly classify the experience or project that has resulted, but I am aware that both have diverged significantly from my expectations.
My central aspiration for onlineintheworld was to rehumanize electronic media in some way. Philosophically, I resonate with Michael Joyce and Katharine Hayles in feeling that something is lost when art or writing becomes disembodied. This is not to say that there is nothing challenging or inherently beautiful about online art. Rather, I struggle with the fact that much of the creativity present online draws energy from the embodied world but feels no compunction to reinvest in it, hyperlinking and posting comments instead. I wanted to find a way to use the internet to facilitate embodied creativity, thus turning the internet out instead of in. I confess that my project may have been driven by a love of paper, but I think that Katharine Hayles might add that "as we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us also remember the fragility of material world that cannot be replaced."
It would not be too much to say that I wanted to change the world with this project. My initial comments would suggest that I did not succeed in this, and I would agree, at least in the terms that I originally intended. Nevertheless, this project did inspire change, and that change transpired in a realm irreducible to ones and zeros. Progress did not come without resistance, or without effort, be that the effort of writing code, taking pictures or standing back from a project as I had never been forced to before. This was not easy, and perhaps this reassures me most that I did not miss my mark.
Superficially, the hardest thing to do with this project was to get people to participate in it. Originally, I had planned to begin the experiment ten days earlier than I did in order to avoid finals, thesis presentations, final concerts and all other manner of end-of-year psychosis. An untimely case of mononucleosis had other things to say, however, so I ended up running the project right in the thick of things. This, shall we say, enriched the experience.
Obviously, getting a large number of people to participate in a project at finals time is going to be an uphill battle. Now, compound that with a project that attempts to be organic, thus opposing conventional forms of solicitation. Despite how worried I was about participation, I disregarded the advice of friends (given both on and offline) and refused to offer rewards for participation in my project or to issue personal requests to friends. I did not stop far short of this, using digesters, mass emails and blog posts to solicit any input that I could. I am proud to report that I did not create a Facebook event. Over the run of the project, I think that participation was acceptable, though less than I would have liked. Several people alluded to our class in their posts, and it appears that one group simply stumbled upon the journal. The varied community that eventually responded to the project rewarded my decision to limit solicitation, even if I would have liked more total activity on the website.
Beyond finding participants, the other human factor that I struggled with was myself. This project interacted with a body of college students preparing for final exams, and I was not exempt from this. Several times I left for afternoon classes, photographed the sites on my way out, went to class, attended a meeting, photographed the sites again, went to work, attended a rehearsal, then posted both updates before going off to another rehearsal. My original vision for the project was to have the updates posted at regular intervals so that the project would evolve smoothly over time. In achieving this result, my performance as the “input device” for onlineintheworld was far from what I would have liked; if I were continuing this project, I would think seriously about upgrading. In my defense, there was (and still is) a virus in the system. If I had known that I would be doing my final project with mono, I would have designed something that required several intense bursts of energy rather than the plodding consistency that I have struggled to maintain.
The last “technical difficulty” that I struggled to overcome was actually technological. You will notice the photographs of the visual site missing from Day 6. Day 6 was essentially continuous motion for me from 9am-11pm, so I knew that I would be shooting the sites when I got a break and posting when I could. This was made even more difficult when I ran by the sites on my way to a meeting to discover that my camera would not turn on. The culprit was dead batteries, worn down as I had left the camera on and plugged in during my last update. I literally did not have time to deal with it, so the photos of this day are lost. I consider this a real failure for the project, because it disrupts the connection between website and physical space.
Now, the difficulties that I reported are not intended to serve as excuses, but as experiences. At first, I struggled to accept the lack of participation and my own inconsistency as part of this project. However, while I would still like to have provided a smoother experience for those viewing my site, I now understand my own challenges as being inextricably linked to this kind of undertaking. My primary goal was to rehumanize electronic creativity in the same fashion as Shelly Jackson’s “Skin” does, by linking it to physical existence. In doing this, the author relinquishes control of the project at a fundamental level. While Jackson knows the story that she wrote, once her written words become embodied “words,” the complexity of her story expands exponentially. Every cup of coffee that one of her words drinks becomes part of the story. The initial text that Jackson wrote forms a web of connections among human lives, each of which has manifold connections of its own that continue to evolve as time goes on. In this sense, my original text was the project that I set in motion. Through its evolution, the project interacted both with its participants, the outside world and my life. The real experiences that resulted on all fronts are intrinsically valid, no matter how they might have departed from my designs.
I see my own project as modest and crude compared to “Skin.” However, I believe that my intent and experience may have been similar. Just as the “story” expands as outward-moving ripples from Jackson’s initial “text,” I feel that my experiences and my experiment have gone outward from a frame, a journal and a website. As related above, the project has interacted very strongly with my life. Particularly, the timeframe that the project needed to run on had to correspond with my (alternatively frantic or cataleptic) state. Often this alignment was off. Interestingly, these disjunctions are only partially recorded in the website. The timestamps mark my late posts, and the flash photography indicates those days when I arrived late. However, a reader of this could not detect the wonderful concert sandwiched between the posts of Day 4 or the difficult conversation that caused me to miss the sun in “Day 3, (Late) Evening.” Likewise, no evidence exists of what the authors of the “Day 6, Evening” went on to do after they wrote in the journal. The inscriptions that I have represent only the momentary overlap of ideas and lives. Even though my product has evolved with outside participation, it remains a fragment of the overall effect of the project. Hopefully, ideas have been sparked in minds other than my own.
The most striking element of my experience in creating and maintaining onlineintheworld was my own impotence in creating content. While being the “upload tool” for the site took consistent energy, there was almost nothing creative about my role. I tried to evacuate myself as much as possible from framing shots or transcribing journal entries. Moreover, even my appeals for participation were catchy without spinning the project too much. The standard of nonintervention that I set soon became authoritative Particularly through the early days of the project when few people were “posting,” I found myself dreaming up plans to write in the middle of the journal or take out one side of the frame. Even when others generated these ideas during class presentations then failed to enact them, or told me about an idea that they had over lunch, I could not make their thoughts a reality any more than my own. My creative role stopped when I launched onlineintheworld, and it begins again only now, as I interpret what others have done. For over a week I was a camera and a keyboard, recording rather than inventing.
Now, let me not present this project as all limitations and shortcomings. While few things went as I had planned them, this was not always a bad thing. I set out to create something that would converse with the “real world,” and I feel that I was very successful in that endeavor. When I first linked to writingmachines, I remember one person saying, “But what will you do if the journal gets stolen?” I replied, “That would be very interesting.” In the style of Andy Goldsworthy, I wanted my work to be uninsulated from natural forces, be they environmental or human. This required me to hold myself back while a dodgeball game went on feet from my fragile visual space. However, it also meant that I could smile as the wind began to play with the leaves in this same place only moments after I had assembled it, or when two young boys jumped over the notebook while playing tag. Though there were only three noticeable human revisions to the visual space, the different lights and gradual wilting of the leaves created variation in my pictures. The experiment was indeed so open that some things I never expected found their way in.
The project interacted with several unanticipated. Perhaps the most striking was the group of posts in “Day Six, Evening” that appear to be from local kids who stumbled on the journal. I have no idea if any of them visited the website to see what they were participating in, and it was here that I wished that I tracked hits. While I cannot be sure if these students understood the conversation that I had intended for them, they added a dimension that could not have been predicted to the project. The other unexpected world that I intersected was pseudoanonymity’s find cassie project. Apparently the stalker “vandalized” the visual space, knowing that Paul would be tracking my project. I thought that this would form an interesting link, but apparently this did not make it to him in time to be included in his project. Without an impetus or artistic reason to link, the connection remains only visual. I did form links with marmalade’s final project, as well as with the the class blog. In my commitment to embodied conversation, I had not considered that the work I was doing would factor into online dialogues as well. Understanding act of linking as a kind of creativity, I deprived myself of the opportunity to link back.
To repeat this yet again, the outcome of this experiment was not so much against what I had envisioned as different from it. I wanted a site with regular traffic, whose contributors linked visual and written media through a minimalist website. Neither element materialized. Traffic was sparse, though interesting. Also, the journal posts were mainly autobiographical, sometimes referring to other journal writings but not recognizing the visual site. Likewise, the visual site remained largely inactive and abstract. While I could impeach my directions or design, the fact is that people used the creative spaces as they saw fit. My goal was to create a project that gave and took from the “real world,” and this seems to have passed. Read bottom to top, the posts in onlineintheworld rant, wilt, joke, shine and shiver. While not as I had planned, the experiment clearly opened up and became human and worldly in its own way, which is the only way that such a result could be authentic.
There are a few more places to go in my analysis of this project, but many return to one question that has been on my mind for several days: what do I do with this now? I could remove the journal, scatter the sticks and take down the site. However, considering that the content itself represents the work of others, I am not sure that I have this right. Marmalade’s insightful comment put this into a blogger’s context, citing Jason Kottke’s experience. After some thought, much of which you have just been forced to read, I have decided to leave onlineintheworld in the world. As of tomorrow, the journal will be replaced with new directions and the cautionary sign will disappear from the visual site. The only change is the severing of my imposed (and often disregarded) ties between media. In recognizing my Goldsworthian roots, I accept that both journal and frame will follow whatever course nature, college students and surrounding world sets for them.
I think this serves my original intent rather nicely. I set up a small project, let it interact with the world, and now I am letting it go to ripple outward as it will. Ultimately, I cannot know whether anyone will learn the profound lesson that I set out to impart, but this experience has convinced me that I can practice what I intended far better than I can preach it. I certainly have my thoughts about what this project has been about, but this project and the class that it serves have been most successful in shaking the belief that my view is absolute. Onlineintheworld continues.
My central aspiration for onlineintheworld was to rehumanize electronic media in some way. Philosophically, I resonate with Michael Joyce and Katharine Hayles in feeling that something is lost when art or writing becomes disembodied. This is not to say that there is nothing challenging or inherently beautiful about online art. Rather, I struggle with the fact that much of the creativity present online draws energy from the embodied world but feels no compunction to reinvest in it, hyperlinking and posting comments instead. I wanted to find a way to use the internet to facilitate embodied creativity, thus turning the internet out instead of in. I confess that my project may have been driven by a love of paper, but I think that Katharine Hayles might add that "as we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us also remember the fragility of material world that cannot be replaced."
It would not be too much to say that I wanted to change the world with this project. My initial comments would suggest that I did not succeed in this, and I would agree, at least in the terms that I originally intended. Nevertheless, this project did inspire change, and that change transpired in a realm irreducible to ones and zeros. Progress did not come without resistance, or without effort, be that the effort of writing code, taking pictures or standing back from a project as I had never been forced to before. This was not easy, and perhaps this reassures me most that I did not miss my mark.
Superficially, the hardest thing to do with this project was to get people to participate in it. Originally, I had planned to begin the experiment ten days earlier than I did in order to avoid finals, thesis presentations, final concerts and all other manner of end-of-year psychosis. An untimely case of mononucleosis had other things to say, however, so I ended up running the project right in the thick of things. This, shall we say, enriched the experience.
Obviously, getting a large number of people to participate in a project at finals time is going to be an uphill battle. Now, compound that with a project that attempts to be organic, thus opposing conventional forms of solicitation. Despite how worried I was about participation, I disregarded the advice of friends (given both on and offline) and refused to offer rewards for participation in my project or to issue personal requests to friends. I did not stop far short of this, using digesters, mass emails and blog posts to solicit any input that I could. I am proud to report that I did not create a Facebook event. Over the run of the project, I think that participation was acceptable, though less than I would have liked. Several people alluded to our class in their posts, and it appears that one group simply stumbled upon the journal. The varied community that eventually responded to the project rewarded my decision to limit solicitation, even if I would have liked more total activity on the website.
Beyond finding participants, the other human factor that I struggled with was myself. This project interacted with a body of college students preparing for final exams, and I was not exempt from this. Several times I left for afternoon classes, photographed the sites on my way out, went to class, attended a meeting, photographed the sites again, went to work, attended a rehearsal, then posted both updates before going off to another rehearsal. My original vision for the project was to have the updates posted at regular intervals so that the project would evolve smoothly over time. In achieving this result, my performance as the “input device” for onlineintheworld was far from what I would have liked; if I were continuing this project, I would think seriously about upgrading. In my defense, there was (and still is) a virus in the system. If I had known that I would be doing my final project with mono, I would have designed something that required several intense bursts of energy rather than the plodding consistency that I have struggled to maintain.
The last “technical difficulty” that I struggled to overcome was actually technological. You will notice the photographs of the visual site missing from Day 6. Day 6 was essentially continuous motion for me from 9am-11pm, so I knew that I would be shooting the sites when I got a break and posting when I could. This was made even more difficult when I ran by the sites on my way to a meeting to discover that my camera would not turn on. The culprit was dead batteries, worn down as I had left the camera on and plugged in during my last update. I literally did not have time to deal with it, so the photos of this day are lost. I consider this a real failure for the project, because it disrupts the connection between website and physical space.
Now, the difficulties that I reported are not intended to serve as excuses, but as experiences. At first, I struggled to accept the lack of participation and my own inconsistency as part of this project. However, while I would still like to have provided a smoother experience for those viewing my site, I now understand my own challenges as being inextricably linked to this kind of undertaking. My primary goal was to rehumanize electronic creativity in the same fashion as Shelly Jackson’s “Skin” does, by linking it to physical existence. In doing this, the author relinquishes control of the project at a fundamental level. While Jackson knows the story that she wrote, once her written words become embodied “words,” the complexity of her story expands exponentially. Every cup of coffee that one of her words drinks becomes part of the story. The initial text that Jackson wrote forms a web of connections among human lives, each of which has manifold connections of its own that continue to evolve as time goes on. In this sense, my original text was the project that I set in motion. Through its evolution, the project interacted both with its participants, the outside world and my life. The real experiences that resulted on all fronts are intrinsically valid, no matter how they might have departed from my designs.
I see my own project as modest and crude compared to “Skin.” However, I believe that my intent and experience may have been similar. Just as the “story” expands as outward-moving ripples from Jackson’s initial “text,” I feel that my experiences and my experiment have gone outward from a frame, a journal and a website. As related above, the project has interacted very strongly with my life. Particularly, the timeframe that the project needed to run on had to correspond with my (alternatively frantic or cataleptic) state. Often this alignment was off. Interestingly, these disjunctions are only partially recorded in the website. The timestamps mark my late posts, and the flash photography indicates those days when I arrived late. However, a reader of this could not detect the wonderful concert sandwiched between the posts of Day 4 or the difficult conversation that caused me to miss the sun in “Day 3, (Late) Evening.” Likewise, no evidence exists of what the authors of the “Day 6, Evening” went on to do after they wrote in the journal. The inscriptions that I have represent only the momentary overlap of ideas and lives. Even though my product has evolved with outside participation, it remains a fragment of the overall effect of the project. Hopefully, ideas have been sparked in minds other than my own.
The most striking element of my experience in creating and maintaining onlineintheworld was my own impotence in creating content. While being the “upload tool” for the site took consistent energy, there was almost nothing creative about my role. I tried to evacuate myself as much as possible from framing shots or transcribing journal entries. Moreover, even my appeals for participation were catchy without spinning the project too much. The standard of nonintervention that I set soon became authoritative Particularly through the early days of the project when few people were “posting,” I found myself dreaming up plans to write in the middle of the journal or take out one side of the frame. Even when others generated these ideas during class presentations then failed to enact them, or told me about an idea that they had over lunch, I could not make their thoughts a reality any more than my own. My creative role stopped when I launched onlineintheworld, and it begins again only now, as I interpret what others have done. For over a week I was a camera and a keyboard, recording rather than inventing.
Now, let me not present this project as all limitations and shortcomings. While few things went as I had planned them, this was not always a bad thing. I set out to create something that would converse with the “real world,” and I feel that I was very successful in that endeavor. When I first linked to writingmachines, I remember one person saying, “But what will you do if the journal gets stolen?” I replied, “That would be very interesting.” In the style of Andy Goldsworthy, I wanted my work to be uninsulated from natural forces, be they environmental or human. This required me to hold myself back while a dodgeball game went on feet from my fragile visual space. However, it also meant that I could smile as the wind began to play with the leaves in this same place only moments after I had assembled it, or when two young boys jumped over the notebook while playing tag. Though there were only three noticeable human revisions to the visual space, the different lights and gradual wilting of the leaves created variation in my pictures. The experiment was indeed so open that some things I never expected found their way in.
The project interacted with several unanticipated. Perhaps the most striking was the group of posts in “Day Six, Evening” that appear to be from local kids who stumbled on the journal. I have no idea if any of them visited the website to see what they were participating in, and it was here that I wished that I tracked hits. While I cannot be sure if these students understood the conversation that I had intended for them, they added a dimension that could not have been predicted to the project. The other unexpected world that I intersected was pseudoanonymity’s find cassie project. Apparently the stalker “vandalized” the visual space, knowing that Paul would be tracking my project. I thought that this would form an interesting link, but apparently this did not make it to him in time to be included in his project. Without an impetus or artistic reason to link, the connection remains only visual. I did form links with marmalade’s final project, as well as with the the class blog. In my commitment to embodied conversation, I had not considered that the work I was doing would factor into online dialogues as well. Understanding act of linking as a kind of creativity, I deprived myself of the opportunity to link back.
To repeat this yet again, the outcome of this experiment was not so much against what I had envisioned as different from it. I wanted a site with regular traffic, whose contributors linked visual and written media through a minimalist website. Neither element materialized. Traffic was sparse, though interesting. Also, the journal posts were mainly autobiographical, sometimes referring to other journal writings but not recognizing the visual site. Likewise, the visual site remained largely inactive and abstract. While I could impeach my directions or design, the fact is that people used the creative spaces as they saw fit. My goal was to create a project that gave and took from the “real world,” and this seems to have passed. Read bottom to top, the posts in onlineintheworld rant, wilt, joke, shine and shiver. While not as I had planned, the experiment clearly opened up and became human and worldly in its own way, which is the only way that such a result could be authentic.
There are a few more places to go in my analysis of this project, but many return to one question that has been on my mind for several days: what do I do with this now? I could remove the journal, scatter the sticks and take down the site. However, considering that the content itself represents the work of others, I am not sure that I have this right. Marmalade’s insightful comment put this into a blogger’s context, citing Jason Kottke’s experience. After some thought, much of which you have just been forced to read, I have decided to leave onlineintheworld in the world. As of tomorrow, the journal will be replaced with new directions and the cautionary sign will disappear from the visual site. The only change is the severing of my imposed (and often disregarded) ties between media. In recognizing my Goldsworthian roots, I accept that both journal and frame will follow whatever course nature, college students and surrounding world sets for them.
I think this serves my original intent rather nicely. I set up a small project, let it interact with the world, and now I am letting it go to ripple outward as it will. Ultimately, I cannot know whether anyone will learn the profound lesson that I set out to impart, but this experience has convinced me that I can practice what I intended far better than I can preach it. I certainly have my thoughts about what this project has been about, but this project and the class that it serves have been most successful in shaking the belief that my view is absolute. Onlineintheworld continues.
posted by crashingintowalls at 1:32 AM
