Project 2 Social Hacking

<p>So for this project I wanted to explore Gaiaonline, it's a web based community formed a long time ago, I used to be an active user years ago, but haven't had time in recent years.</p>

<p>This website is almost an anonymous site where users create and avatar to their liking and have discussions, play artwork up, accept commissions, roleplay, there are games and an MMORPG where users can interact and create teams and guilds to defeat monsters.</p>

<p>I wanted to use this site to see how users would respond to an item somewhat rare, that you have to purchase (during a limited time) with real world cash.  The item is going on the market place (Gaia's auctioning system) for roughly 12k Gaia Gold.</p>

<p>I wanted to see how users would react to asking for a short 450-500 word story about a panda, with no rules or writing prompts.  I promised 3 Sacred Keys (give once used you get various items) to the top 3 writers.</p>

Even still it did not seem to get many comments or submissions.  I guess it shows people would rather spend their money on it themselves than take a few minutes to write a short story.

*EDIT*

Even after all this time, still sitting there, nobody commented on the post.  12/18/15

Week 5 Readings

What relational aesthetics can learn from 4chan

4chan is an in the moment type site.  The images are ephemeral, short lived. "Keeps no permanent record of itself,"

“It is up to us as beholders of art to bring [unforeseen associations] to light, [”¦] to judge artworks in terms of the relations they produce in the specific contexts they inhabit” [3] concludes Bourriaud in his 2001 book, Postproduction."

Sociable Media

"In unmediated communication, social cues are communicated through words, tone of voice, gesture, clothing, facial expression, proximity, etc. These cues provide information about a person’s age, race, social class, and gender, they reveal emotional state, and they help to choreograph the interaction. In mediated communication, some or most of these cues are absent, and other cues, nonexistent in the unmediated world, may be present."

Unmediated, meaning face to face, in person, with nothing blocking the actual view or providing cover.  

Mediated, meaning there is obscurity in the vision and it is easier than ever to change what is or can be seen.  Much easier to lie about who you are and what you look like since you are not necessarily face to face.Video-conferencing- is it better to be seen while having the meeting?  You may be seen and your tone as well as feeling may be made more clear, but you don't always have a clear or proper connection.  If that is the case, then wouldn't text based or televised conferencing be better? 

Computer based communication has changed the way we create art and communication.  You have the choice either way of being anonymous, but don't always have tombs choice whether or not your work is preserved for a long period of time.  You can take it down whenever, but in order for the physical piece to stay relevant, then you have to have someone take an active interest.  With media based, you can keep promoting and pushing your pieces all over the place.

Project 1, Objects and Stories

Part of the Coding, of the main body and a screenshot of the main image displayed.

Week 3 Readings

PHP Tutorial
Contained a good deal of information that helped walk me through the basics of creating a form, which is something I'm planning on making in the near future for a personal side project.

PHP/MySQL Tutorial
With this tutorial, I was able to get a better understanding of databases.  Something I am planning on making requires me to be able to view user input (such as addresses) in order to distribute them to other users.  (I am planning on creating an event for a fanclub and will need information, to do a card/ or gift exchange.)  My biggest issue in creating this, would be to get the users input in a form that is easily comprehensible for myself.

I like how it walks you through setting up a database.


"Database as Symbolic Form", Lev Manovich 
" In computer science database is defined as a structured collection of data. The data stored in a database is organized for fast search and retrieval by a computer and therefore it is anything but a simple collection of items. Different types of databases — hierarchical, network, relational and object-oriented — use different models to organize data."

Computer Science and Software engineering were formerly called Data Processing.

"The new media object consists of one or more interfaces to a database of multimedia material"

"The elements on a syntagmatic dimension are related in praesentia, while the elements on a paradigmatic dimension are related in absentia. For instance, in the case of a written sentence, the words which comprise it materially exist on a piece of paper, while the paradigmatic sets to which these words belong only exist in writer's and reader's minds. Similarly, in the case of a fashion outfit, the elements which make it, such as a skirt, a blouse, and a jacket, are present in reality, while pieces of clothing which could have been present instead — different skirt, different blouse, different jacket — only exist in the viewer's imagination. Thus, syntagm is explicit and paradigm is implicit; one is real and the other is imagined."


"Death of the Author" (PDF), Roland Barthes
Not entirely sure how to respond to this in the form of Web.  What I mostly got out of it, is when the Author dies, so does the true means and understanding of the work.  If you take that literally to a Web Page, when the creator dies, the page will also eventually die unless someone takes it up and keeps paying for the domain.

Research Presentation, The Xanadu Hijack

http://turbulence.org/commissions/xanadu/

http://lab404.com/xanadu_hijack/

The artists of the “Xanadu Hijack” are Curt Cloninger and Seth Johnson.  The two have come together to “Hijack” the word “Xanadu.”  What they are trying to do by “hijacking” the word is essentially trick Google Search into showing images that are unrelated to each other contextually, but have a common connection by a watermarked logo.   They want the images to be associated by the word Xanadu.  Some names and terms associated with the word Xanadu, are:  Kublai Khan, Coleridge’s Poem “Kubla Khan”, Olivia Newton-John, Citizen Kane’s Xanadu Mansion,  and The Muses from Xanadu.

Curt Cloninger-

            Cloninger is an artist, writer and designer that uses video, performances and programming.  His works are focused on words and the associations that are given with certain words.

Seth Johnson

“Seth Johnson is a founding member of the multi-media collaboration called Carnal Torpor. Carnal Torpor investigates ideologically motivated social structures such as institutionalized religion, occult practices, and marketing strategies.”

            This being said, the two’s works are closely related as show by the project Hijacking Xanadu.  They want the word to basically take over the search engine and essentially become almost cult-like with the number of images and associations that are given to the word

“We want to hijack the word "Xanadu" and modulate it for a while. We will create several visual images in dialogue with Xanadu's residual history (Kahn, Coleridge, Kane, Kissimmee, Newton-John, Nelson, Broadway, Las Vegas, New Jersey, etc.)”

This quote from the turbulence.com site really sums up the purpose of the project:

“The difference between this project and branding is that we are not branding anything other than the process of branding. We are (re-)branding the word to nothing, to return the ownership of the word to the word itself. By making Xanadu a common noun rather than a proper noun, it becomes its own word again. Once a noun becomes a proper noun, it is owned by a particular immanent instantiation in the historical world. But lowercase "water" is just water.”

“  We want to play the entire network as a single instrument, causing Google Images to "perform" a bricolaged visual "score" we have composed.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=xanadu&espv=2&biw=1111&bih=701&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAmoVChMIvIHPq7TXxwIVCM2ACh2C1A8U#tbm=isch&q=xanadu+hijack