We were given 3 project prompts – Language, Data, and Bots. I chose data.
I’m making 1 serious project and 1 unserious project. This post is going to be about my unserious project covering my own database from #pgirl-image-channel.
In my last blog post for Serious Project 1, I spoke about being inspired by works that can double sas both art pieces and campaigning tools, but for this project I became inspired by a physical exhibition that I went to, named Rate My Setup by Mauro C. Martinez.
There were 2 main parts to the exhibition – the upstairs, where there were large acrylic paintings of several pictures gathered from the r/RateMySetup subreddit. Through these paintings, this Martinez reflects on the lengths that internet users will go to stay connected to eachother.
To me, these paintings appear as almost Renaissance-esque depiction of life during our recent history as a species battling constant social isolation. Martinez specifically touches upon the role of technology in his life during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way of keeping in contact with all of his friends – the bland neutrals of the home enterior contrasting with the bright, inviting hues of the various screens in each painting allude to the mundanity, and perhaps, bleakness of the real, physical world as opposed to the limitless internet where the margains for social acceptance are significantly larger AND you can’t infect or be infected. These are pictures of a communtity that can ONLY exist online, bringing visibility to a world that is invisible, the virtual. I became fascinated with these highly reflective paintings and for my project, decided to look inside myself and see what I could create in the same manner.
Downstairs, a few of the paintings had been physically recreated, inviting you to dwell on the physical implications of setups that are barely stable.
One of the setups was completely open to mess around and interact with – So of course me and my friends messed with the computers and took loads of pictures of ourselves with the webcam, reset the desktop wallpaper, played solitare and almost tagged the pc with pictures drawn in MS Paint. I visited the exhibition twice, and on the second time I came I noticed another group did the same thing to the computer. Checking the hard drive, we noticed there were many many pictures taken over all of the days the exhibition was open. This open PC reflected the images in the rest of the exhibition by providing an open platorm for user generated content, like the internet itself.
I love user generated content. I grew up playing Little Big Planet for a significant amount of my childhood, and I also have several personal databases from gathering images of interest from the internet from a young age. For this project, i decided to use a user generated database I had started in a similar vein when I was 16 or 17, in the form of a channel in a mildly popular discord server I used to moderate, called #pgirl-image-channel.
I sent this message out in 2021 and recieved about 1.2k images in response.
Because our submission for this unit is digital only, I decided to reuse the skills from my serious project and make another website encompassing a digital gallery. I’m going to pick <15 pictures and paint them, then exhibit them in a similar way to the RateMySetup exhibition, almost as a way to reflect on the images from the online communites I grew up immersed in.