For the remainder of this class I’ll attempt to discover the sort of “hidden style” of not just the structures of interfaces in digital media (windows, buttons, menus, scrolling… GUI paradigms in general) but of the content itself that fills these structures, specifically on the web. Because content on the web (image, video, and text, interactive or not) encapsulates objects, people, places, and ideas, from arguably every period of human history, could the resulting aesthetic vernacular really be considered an overarching style of everything, a mess of clashing styles and perspectives from wildly different paradigms? Is this what defines our current zeitgeist, and if so, what does that mean for the future? What could possibly come after this massive collapse of time and space in aesthetic understanding?

This kind of flattening seems to have an affect on many things, like political perspectives, cultural diversity (global homogenization in fashion, language, icons, etc), and maybe even more. So not only could the web be considered an “artistic medium” but it’s also arguably the primary source of information dissemination and media consumption for many people all over the world.

I will realize this using appropriated media as facilitated by the use of web APIs for various content aggregators and media platforms. I’ll try to focus on content “hubs” to minimize bias but it will be interesting to see the bias inherent in my choosing regardless, if not instrumental in helping to discover to what degree the web today acts as a window into any sort of objective paradigm of everything.

References:

What was your first experience of going online? … What about Google image search? “I specifically remember my first image search. I searched for trees. Like, “green trees.” And it was really overwhelming because there were so many pictures of trees, all at once. Before, you could only look at books.” (src)

 

art history has been “flattened” for artists of a certain age. “When they typed in ‘tree’ ” in a search engine, … “they got a thousand pictures of a tree: a picture of a tree made in the 18th century, a tree made last year, a cartoon of a tree. You have this flattening of time.” (src)

Edward Shenk “Theorist” — Visual artist leveraging right-leaning conspiracy theorist type of content that he apparently finds often on facebook and can probably be recognized to be more or less prevalent on the web by most people. He breaks this style of image-making down to its formal qualities, revealing the sort of sinister underlying tone… “There’s this manic connection-making like in the darker parts of A Beautiful Mind. If something looks like something else then that is proof enough. There is no such thing as pure coincidence, and that’s a hallmark of paranoia.” (src)

XTAL fSCK video performance — The visuals these performers create exemplify the “default” visual effects inherent in the MacOS UI: mashing [ctrl+alt+cmd+8] to use the color-inversion accessibility feature to create a strobe effect, using Quicktime’s screen recording feature to create endless recursion, swiping between desktop spaces, opening and minimizing windows with genie-effect in slow-motion, emojis and iconography are all overlaid and mashed together ad nauseum. The way the MacOS UI is exposed in this formal performative context reveals and accentuates visual qualities that were hidden in plain sight, forcing the audience to realize age-old questions of artistic merit and technological control in a context that we find ourselves in every day but perhaps overlook.