The role of the internet is integral in both of my projects as it is the medium of which both originated from. Both databases come from many sources but are slightly different. The presence of the TDoR database nowadays comes from data being sent to the administrator, in emails or from social media and from people. Before social media, I imagine a lot of it came from word-of-mouth, online or offline. It lives within the people affected. My image database is presenceless – it has no clear origin, but it doesnt come from nowhere. in that sense, it is sprawling full of disjointed locations and origins. it lives everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The communities contrast – Trans people over the world trying to survive, and a small group of 500 people.
at the cci. YEAR 0
Category: Intro to Computational Practice
Posts from my Intro to Computational Practice class with Jazmin Morris. I was 19!
To download my dataset, I downloaded this program and edited the config.ini file to navigate to my channel of choice.
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!
Trigger warning: Violence agaisnt trans people
Let’s look at the TDoR database. I’ve been following this database for a few years.
Every year on or around 20th November trans people worldwide gather for the Transgender Day of Remembrance to remember those we have lost to violence in the past year.
This site gives details of trans people known to have been killed, as collated from reports by Transgender Europe and trans activists worldwide.
Details are also given for those lost to suicide where known.
The site is intended to act as a supporting resource for anyone involved in Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR) events and is intended to be used alongside the official data collated by the Trans Murder Monitoring Project and published by Transgender Europe (TGEU) in early November of each year.
A big thanks are due to the many trans activists and organisations worldwide who work tirelessly collate data on anti-trans violence and in particular to the members and admins of the Trans Violence News Facebook group, without whose support this site would not be possible.
All material presented is gathered from publicly available sources. Please don’t read anything into the raw numbers. What matters is the lives lost, and their stories. Be warned though – some of their stories are horrific.
This project is generally of more of a solemn topic as transgender people become more and more persecuted each day in horiffic and violent ways. One of the things that spurred me on into being more enthusiastic about this specific dataset is the death of my close friend Claire, an 18 year old trans girl. She died by suicide in April of this year, which was extremely difficult for me as we used to be extremely close. I just remember thinking ‘I, and we, are to young to be dealing with this.’
We have no protective weapons, we only have ourselves as we are stripped of our rights. Recently, I’ve also been lookng at perspectives by genocide scholars discussing what the future looks like for us as one of the most persecuted groups on the planet within the context of the 10 stages of genocide.
I believe that we are nearing stage 8 and 9, as recently it was noted that Florida recently published a bill citing that child sex offenders can be punished by the death penalty. Horrifyingly, it’s also being pushed that Florida, a state that ONLY recognises transgender people to legislate that they should have no access to healthcare and young trans girls can’t play sports with the other girls at school, is also trying to mandate that those being caught in the ‘wrong bathroom’ can be charged with a child sex offence. Do you make the connection?
So, as younger transgender people who reside mainly on the internet for our comfort and community as the real world gets worse and worse, I thought, perhaps we need weapons. Not in the sense that all trans people should arm themselves, but campaigning weapons and resources for ourselves.
So I see the TDoR website as a tool, as a weapon, something like the bricks thrown during Stonewall – as it is the cumulative dataset which is used to organise vigils for transgender people for us to remember our dead. It can be used for protesting, rememberance, and an open source of information as I see that our killings are being denied. In fact, upon searching for articles to read for this blog post, I saw many articles trying to say that ‘trans genocide isn’t real, we are not at risk of being killed more than anyone else.’
It tells you otherwise. It will become a staggeringly important source of information in the future. So, what can I personally make from this?
Perhaps if this website is a sword, I can make a shield. What I want to make is a gentle, comforting website where we can explore and reflect on what’s happening to us safely – a digital saferoom, perhaps. This concept likely needs more facets and development, but the bare minimum will be a dataset OF masterposts and of the victims from this year.
How often do you think you interact with bots in your daily life? Mention some examples.
I’m literally writing this blog post late and I genuinely think the answer to this question is different to how it was a few weeks ago especially with the release of Snapchat AI. Most people i know have been spending hours talking to bots recently.
in what other ways do you think bots could play a different role in your practice or daily life?
I want to say they’re too primitive – theyre silly little programs that acts like little bits of a decimated brain. Recently, lots of people have been spending time talking to Snap AI and ChatGPT, so I personally one day see bots replacing the roles of single session counsellors. I do not think it should expand past single session counselling as I do not belive a data collecting brainless machine can give a long term counselling course or trauma therapy with no real life nuance, let alone the lack of human connection necesarry for someone to trust a counsellor.
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.
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 serious project covering the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDoR) database.
Firstly, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a couple of weeks hence the late post, but in the course resources I found a website called Get Well Soon by Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain. It’s a website compiling comments posted on GoFundMe’s medical fundraisers – A database that should not exist, and only exists due to America’s healthcare system.
The website also encompasses a revolutionary political text provided with the archive. I will include an excerpt but the rest of the text by Johanna Hedva is available on the website.
Those of us for whom sickness is an everyday reality have long known about its revolutionary potential. We’ve known that a revolution can look like a horizontal body in a bed, unable to go to work. We’ve known that it might look like hundreds of thousands of bodies in bed, organizing a rent strike, separating life’s value from capitalist productivity. We’ve known that a revolution can look like the labor of a single nurse, keeping the patients in her ward alive, or the labor of a single friend, helping you buy groceries. We’ve known that it can look like the labor of nursing and care expanded exponentially, all of us reaching out to everyone we know, everyone we know reaching out to theirs. We’ve known that a revolution can look like a community pitching in $5 per person for someone’s medical treatment—we’ve wondered when that community would notice just how revolutionary the act of communal care is.
Johanna Hedva
This website made me very fascinated with the concept of creating political art from databases and especially presenting data as both art and as campaining tools. Therefore, I decided to use the TDoR database to achieve the same effect.
I have been following this database and their work for a number of years now but was reminded of it through the death of my friend Claire. To this day I don’t think i’m even close to writing an entry on her but I still want to appreciate the database during this difficult time for me.
So my general idea is that I make a similar website based on this!
Categories
Week 4 – DATA
This week, we were supposed to gather our own data set.
RESEARCH
I already had 2 data sets of random pictures that i’ve been collecting for years – 1 of which using a mildly popular discord server that i used to admin themed around ENA. There is a channel called ‘pgirl image channel’ named after me and specifically dedicated to pictures i would like – other server members too collected similar datasets and many different people passing through posted pictures in it. I collected about 2,000 pictures over the span of 2 years.
PROCESS
I had to use a program to extract every single picture from this channel and output them into a folder – the link to the tutorial I used is here.
OUTCOME
This is a link to download the database in its current state. Below are some thumbnails.
This week, we had to describe a a chosen artist’s relationship to the word copy, and make notes on a text.
Antonio Robert’s relationship to the word copy:
‘To prohibit copying is to prohibit creativity and its natural spread.’
For this week, we had to create an algorithm that can make something in our lives easier. I chose to write psuedocode that reflects the recipe of one of my cultural dishes, daal chawal (Lentil stew with basmati rice and pickled red onion.)
Here was my code:
Write a piece of code that you help perform a daily task more efficiently,
in particular, a task that involves a certain level of "repetition". Use
a programmatic logic to define the task and series of steps — this can be
just a few sentences.
Tip: Think of the examples from the lecture,
you can combine code and poetry; code and cooking recipes; code and choreography;
Also you can check further references in the resources below.
Remember to add this task to your blog, and add a short explanation
behind the making of this task. Also, add any relevant comments to the source code
file that helps better understand it. We will be sharing it in the next class.
DAAL CHAWAL
//Dis is how u make one of my cutural foods with code.
let pot = []
let riceCooker = []
let woodenSpoon;
let fryingPan[]
let bowl = []
let lentils
let cupWater
let garlic
let salt
let rice
let butter
let redChilli
let crushedChilli
let garamMasala
let tumericPowder
let corianderPowder
let cuminSeeds
let redOnion // no red onions for Dahlia ;]
let lemonJuice
function Daal{
potWater = cupWater*4
//lentils
pot.append(lentils, potWater)
//spices
pot.append(redChilli, crushedChilli, garamMasala, tumericPowder, corianderPowder, cuminSeeds)
Stir();
Rice();
Pickle();
time.sleep(1hr)
Stir();
Tarka();
bowl.append(Rice(),Daal(),Pickle());
}
function Rice{
riceWater = cupwater * 2
riceCooker.append[rice,riceWater,butter]
time.sleep(20m)
riceCooker[].warm
}
function Stir{
Pot.push(woodenSpoon);
time.sleep(10s)
Pot.pop;
}
function Tarka{
fryingPan.append[butter,garlic,cuminSeeds]
time.sleep(45s)
pot.append(fryingPan[])
}
function Pickle{
bowl.append(redOnion,salt)
time.sleep(10m)
bowl.wash()
bowl.append(lemonJuice)
}
Dahlia’s edit to my code was the comment ‘No red onions for Dahlia’ because she doesn’t like them!
This week, we were asked ‘What is a computer?’. Here were my responses to the group worksheet.
It’s a group many many of transistors that can hold numbers and do calculations. It can manipulate and store data.
Computers used to be used for a group of kids to crowd around and experience things like YouTube and Club Penguin for the first time. It used to be used for accidentally downloading trojan viruses on Limewire(the file you got was also completely mislabeled), used for playing internet checkers and purble place and chess titans and updating your myspace status to N-Dubz lyrics and getting superpoked by your grandma on Facebook. Computers will become something we can’t fathom right now, because how did we know that we’d ever experience something like this 15 years ago? 30 years ago? 5 years ago?