HALEEMA
at the cci. YEAR 0

Category: Unserious Project 2

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Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Serious Project 1: Update 6 – Completion

http://tdor-safehouse.glitch.me/

I feel my project is not fully realised due to the scale of it within my timeframe, but this is something I will very much be revisiting. What I had managed to publish on glitch was only my preface. The code for the page pertaining to my dataset will be posted below.

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<title>tdor-safehouse</title>
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<body background="ASSETS/bg.jpg">


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<table width="550" height="70" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="headtable">
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      <td><h1 class="header">&nbsp;Resources</h1></td>
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        <h2> Masterposts </h2>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://www.tumblr.com/transstudiesarchive/168139537672/transgender-resources-masterpost';"> Transgender Resource Masterpost by Bryn Thomas</a> <br><br>
         
<a href="window.location.href='https://transgenderteensurvivalguide.com/post/164540851980/thegrangersapprentice-all-things-pertaining-to';">Massive Self Care Masterpost</a> <br><br>
        
<a href="window.location.href='https://transgenderteensurvivalguide.com/post/144842314245/dysphoria-tips-masterpost';"> Dysphoria Tips Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://realtransfacts.tumblr.com/post/180287510823/gender-questioning-masterpost';"> Gender Questioning Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://nonbinaryresource.tumblr.com/post/190387009652/being-trans-without-dysphoria-masterpost';"> Being Trans Without Dysphoria Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://howtotrans.com/tag/masterpost/';"> How To Trans</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://medium.com/@hhunkin3/debunking-transmedicalism-a-masterpost-5c63c367f8b8';"> Debunking Transmedicalism Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://realtransfacts.tumblr.com/post/179351610973/top-surgery-masterpost';"> Top Surgery Masterpost</a> <br><br>

<a href="window.location.href='https://nekosabina.tumblr.com/post/126280798271/the-librarians-gender-masterpost/amp';"> The Librarian's Gender Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='';"> A Transgender Person’s Guide to Parents Masterpost </a> <br><br>
          
		<h2> Mental Health </h2>
		  <p>Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860

GLBT National Hotline: 888-843-4564 <br><br>

National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs: 212-714-1141(English and Spanish) <br><br>

GLBT National Youth Talkline: 800-246-7743 <br><br>

DeHQ: LGBTQ Helpline for South Asians: 908-367-3374 <br><br>

<a href="window.location.href='https://www.lgbthealth.org.uk/';">LGBT Health and Wellbeing Scotland (counselling waitlist may be full, keep an eye out)</a>

<a href="window.location.href='https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/paintings/cyber.html';">The Gender Centre Resources and Downloads</a> <br><br>

<a href="window.location.href='https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/paintings/cyber.html';">The Gender Spectrum Guide to Trans Mental Health </a> <br><br>
                   
<a href="window.location.href='https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/paintings/cyber.html';"> Self Care and Additional Resources </a> <br><br>
            
<h2>Campaigning Tools</h2>
          
<a href="window.location.href='http://publicinterest.org.uk/FramingEqualityToolkit.pdf';">Framing Equality Toolkit</a><br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/debunking-handbook-2020/';">The Debunking Toolkit</a><br><br>
        
<a href="window.location.href='https://glaad.org/tdor/';">GLAAD - TDoR</a><br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://glaad.org/tdor/https://tdor.translivesmatter.info/';">TDoR Database by Anna-Jayne Metcalfe</a><br><br>
		
<a href="window.location.href='https://campaignbootcamp.org/';">Campaign Bootcamp</a><br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201919/cmselect/cmwomeq/96/96.pdf';">Enforcing the Equality Act: the law and the role of the Equality and Human Rights Commission: Government and Equality and Human Rights Commission Responses to the Committee’s Tenth Report of Session 2017–19</a><br><br>          
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Upon reflection, I realise my concept can be expanded in many ways as there is so much more data of other scenarios within my theme. If i had to revisit this project and take it even further, I would not only make use of converging datasets but I would create my own separate features of the website that make it significantly more unique and more worth visiting than it is already – for example writng my own resources instead of using lists of other people’s creations or bringing more art to it than the text included. The original use was a double sided campaigning tool and art piece which wasn’t what I fully achieved in my opinion as that’s a concept that would need significantly more time and research to make properly. Overall, I still find it mostly useful to have all of this information in one place on my computer even if it didn’t make it to a live website.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 5 – Display Captions and Code

Coding the website was a nightmare due to the clunkiness of Neocites – even if it’s on purpose.

I started the index page using the pre-requisite message.

When finishing the website, I will change the captioning message to a longer, more thoughtful text.

Importantly, every single image I chose had context that I could talk about in display captions. However, I realise that i’m running out of time in the project to write detailed display captions about every image. To combat this, I will try and write at least a short sentence for every picture, and develop a handful of captions if i feel it is more relevant to a data themed project. The captions are to present my paintings to a general wider audience and explain the context within them even if they are highly personal to my online experience.

To make the navigation, I used invisible tables and Windows XP boxes from my CSS package that made it much easier.

look how easy! however <a href> does not work and the correct way to actually use the buttons is to put ‘onclick=””‘ in the img properties.

However, something that i found long and gruelling was making 14 individual webpages for each painting and indexing every page within the website. It’s stressful and time consuming.

It took a lot of adjusting. In the website’s current state, lots of pictures appear too large and I do not want an audience to have to scroll to see the full image. Each individual page will need to be tested. I’m honestly worrying if i will have them finished at all.

My display captions do not have the desired effect but they do have some insight. I will try to make up for the lack of content in the display captions by adding to the preface paragraph.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 4 – Neocities

I had to refresh myself on html and css, so I pirated Dreamweaver and made a Nicki Minaj themed website.

Time to create my website with Neocities. Neocities is a recreation of Geocities, which was a service that let users create websites for free in the early 90s. At one point Geocities was almost one of the most browsed sites on the early internet and became a creative sandbox where users mainly made use of simple HTML.

Websites on Geocities looked like this.

I feel geocities is also relevant as a possible origin source for some of the graphics seen in images in the data set – but this is still incredibly ambiguous.

Functionally, I really hated Neocities IDE – or lack thereof. It is an online text editor with no preview options, so I was crossreferencing a lot with Dreamweaver while I coded this website. I’m assuming they are trying to stay as faithful to older methods. I did the majority of my code in dreamweaver.

To begin, I decided to look for a CSS library in the style of Windows XP or 98. This is to save time on my part in constructing a stylesheet, but also to imitate the Joel G website and other neocities websites. I feel it is fitting.

I found this library to use for a windows XP stylesheet.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 3 – Paintings

I traced, painted and scanned my entire collection after sorting them into their categories.

Below is a timelapse of one of my paintings.

I’ll upload my scans here.

UNDERSKETCHES

PAINTINGS

Acrylic paint was chosen to imitate the style of RateMySetup and to invoke a feeling within the viewer of a window to the past – like a renaissance painting, I want an audience to be able to see my website and feel how it felt for us to grow up in a tiny online subculture hoarding data, and the wonder and curiorsity we had associated with the origins of thousands of mysterious images with no explainable origins. The way we communicated with eachother using pictures like that, the wierd and surreal media we enjoyed, and liminal photographs associated with the feeling of childhood isolation. An audience’s look into the short life of people that lived invisibly.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 2 – My dataset

To download my dataset, I downloaded this program and edited the config.ini file to navigate to my channel of choice.

Not showing the finished edit because it has my password in it.

The program was able to produce an entire folder of images saved from the channel.

The link to the zip file is here.

Next in order was to select which pictures I wanted to paint.

I went through 3 iterations of choosing which pictures to use, settling on 14.

I then divided them into 4 categories:

  • Liminal, meaning liminal space images that are usually real pictures taken on older digital cameras in a ‘transitional’ space that invoke a dreamy or unreal feeling
  • Cyber + Surrealism, meaning images usually orginating from the 2000’s web with the unique aesthetic of the time
  • Media, meaning images of or derived from popular media within this subculture
  • Memes also from this subculture specifically

In the gallery, I will separate the paintings based on these categories.

I purchased a sketchbook. I printed off each picture and am going to trace them individually into the sketchbook, using a lightbox rented from CSM library.

I still haven’t decided the mode of this gallery – My first thought was a neocities website to stay on theme with the images in question, but Jazmin suggested something like a framevr gallery. We will have to see!

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 1 – Project Idea

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.

Hot Single Anime Chicks With Dicks Near You!
It’s Jade in front of one of the paintings. She was excited to see this one specifically.

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.

This one in particular irks me. That’s dirty!

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.