In my original post about possible thesis topics I mentioned terrain vague, a term to describe indeterminate spaces that inform and are essential to the urban milieu. Here I ruminate on how we might interact or depict terrain vague in a digital context.

médiatique vague

This week my thinking began to turn toward examinations of some unseen aspects of the internet. Particularly “packets” and web crawlers how they might be rendered more visible. A server with a public end point on the web is being visited by crawlers and packets, which can maybe be compared to how a cell exists in some substrate. Ambient collisions of enzymes determine when and how DNA replicates.

This lecture about genetics helps to illustrate what I’m trying to talk about: https://youtu.be/_dRXA1_e30o?t=3838

Can a system of code, servers, packets and web crawlers interact in a way similar to cell biology? Can it be made visible / interactive? Can it be interactive without human intervention?

The idea of self altering code has been around for a while, it is used at moment of setup (i.e. “choose your language”) and also in encryption and viruses.

A quine is a computer program that takes no input and only produces an exact copy of its own code. Can we alter this concept to include environmental stressors?

 

The Aesthetics of Narcissism

For my academic paper I chose to read “The Aesthetics of Narcissism” by Rosalind Krauss. The paper begins with a revue of video art where the subject of the video is the artists themselves.

Krauss makes the observation:

“Video’s real medium is a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object – an Other – and invest it in the Self. Therefore, it is not just any psychological condition one is speaking of. Rather it is the condition of someone who has, in Freud’s words, “abandoned investment of objects with libido and transformed object-libido into ego-libido.” And that is the specific condition of narcissism.

In the conclusion, Krauss says narcissism is a form of “bracketing-out the world”, which resonated with me because in my work I often think of narcissism as a cul-de-sac -a turning back upon oneself.

Mood Board: vague spaces

terrain vague meets médiatique vague

https://www.are.na/jay-mollica/vague-spaces

vague space can be defined as overlooked and unused aspects of built environment (virtual or physical) that inspire emergent pathways of expression orthogonal to economic intention.

A few excerpts from the are.na collection…

1.

In an introduction to the movie Killer of Sheep, Juliet Clark writes: “Only the kids, leaping from roof to roof, seem to achieve a mobility that eludes their elders.”

The above image is a screen shot from Killer of Sheep that also serves as the cover to Mos Def’s 2009 album The Ecstatic.

2.

In a twitter thread artist Everest Pipkin describes reclaiming economic spaces as “concrete slab design principals”:

built for commerce, abandoned back to the wider world > technically open to whoever, but nobody else wants to be there > sometimes you find traces of last night’s party which you weren’t at and maybe wasn’t even your friends > bad cell reception > good acoustics

3.

Concrete Island is a novel by J.G. Ballard about someone who becomes stranded in a highway median. With all manner of motorists around him he is nonetheless stuck in this limbo and even encounters entire communities that have sprung up in this liminal space.

Dream Review

Whatever it is, I hope it exists outside of category.