Technology, Life, and Death in the Age of the Internet
Skills:
Adobe Illustrator
Lasercutting
Plastic Thermoforming
Rapid Prototyping
Solidworks 3D Modeling
Interdisciplinary Capstone
Solo project, 1 month
Spring 2019
Advisor: Prof Elaine Treharne
Exhibited at:
The Stanford Department of English
The Women and Gender Minorities in Digital Humanities Collegium
Prompt:
Create a capstone project that unites knowledge from English literature, Media Studies, Computer Science, and Linguistics.
Approach:
Create a set of objects to physically represent typically virtual processes and spaces. Similar to how books act as physical embodiments of the stories and history within, computers act as tangible representations of modern technology and innovation. I show this through first placing a spotlight on the exaggerated mechanisms within a computer, the primary interface with which we experience technology, and a landmark innovation. Secondly through an embodiment and meditation on the physical space we occupy on the Internet. I take the virtual and give them physical housing, place backend issues to the forefront, and ask the viewer to consider that which is usually hidden out of sight.
Additional constraints:
A shortened deadline for additional exhibition opportunity.
Overview
This exhibition abstracts, condenses, and gives representation to data centers, the internal circuits of a computer, factory assembly lines, rare mineral mining, fossil fuel usage, the ugly and the strange backbones of modern Internet that are usually hidden out of sight. Breaking the boundary of the screen, which permits viewing some but obscures others, I create a 3 dimensional manifestation of what is out of sight.
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Upon view, the viewer becomes part of the installation, becomes implicated, as participants of the Internet are.
The Monitor
Description
This installation is an abstraction of tombstones in a graveyard, server stacks in a datacenter, and individual user webpages on a social network. The usage of plastic is done in consideration and in conversation with the role of fossil fuels in the Internet age -- the fundamental power source of electronics manufacturing, maintenance, and usage.
Plastic is used as a derivative of fossil fuels, further complicated by its identity as a non-biodegradable material derived from the previously organic.
Inspiration
The desktop monitor is the most recent innovation in text technology. It is the latest in the literature documentation lineage, with ancestors including scrolls, turtle shells, stone tablets, parchment, and printed books. We use this object as a primary interface for gaining and exchanging knowledge.
The classic Macintosh desktop monitor is iconic. I researched early versions of the first personal desktop computers to find the classic look of the object that made modern computing legible.
Prototyping
Fig 1. early assembly prototype, 4" x 4"
Fig 1. front view of early prototype, reflection of photographer's face visible on front panel, as intended.
Batteries stand in for fuel sources, metal wires remind of the metallic veins that transport electricity through a computer, black ink stained shredded Post-It's represent disfigured books with text smeared and no longer visible, contained within the depths of a computer monitor.
Herein Lies
The usage of mirror is continued as a central component in this second installation of the exhibition. The reflection flips the voyeurism inherent in viewing art back onto the viewer.
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The mirror juxtaposes the viewer's face and gaze with the object they are viewing.
In a sense, as you view the object, the object views you.
Description
This installation is an abstraction of tombstones in a graveyard, server stacks in a datacenter, and individual user webpages on a social network. The usage of plastic is done in consideration and in conversation with the role of fossil fuels in the Internet age -- the fundamental power source of electronics manufacturing, maintenance, and usage.
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Plastic is used as a derivative of fossil fuels, further complicated by its identity as a non-biodegradable material derived from the previously organic.
Audience Interaction
The unused blanks of the mirrored person-shaped figures were placed into a container by the installation. Visitors were allowed to take home a figure. They are manufactured out of the same pattern, the same sheet of material, yet now adopted and travel across the world on a journey that is uniquely their own. This simulates the propagation of information on the internet, the similar process of offering up a tidbit of yourself, others accept the offering and taking it with them to unknown areas and using them in unknown ways. A friend said her 5 year old now likes to play with it, another said they taped it to their wall. I have no idea where the others are in the world or if I will ever see them again.
Summary
The mirror reflects and permits entry, juxtaposes viewer and internal artwork, human and machine, and makes the monitor interior boundless. This boundlessness is in reflection of the electronic communication device's ability to transcend its physical capacity, to create images of the entire world within one small object.
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Different images are generated as viewers walk around the object. At each viewing perspective, the image generated to the viewer is dependent on the optic and mechanical properties of acrylic - the deflection of the acrylic distorts and obscures, or holds space for a clear and transparent transmission of internal imagery. The angle of view changes how much the viewer sees their own face reflected back, and how much of the machine's internal circuits are revealed.
Light emitting wires represent the computer's internal circuitry, clear tubing represents oil running through its veins, human figurines within the monitor constructing and maintaining the machine reference the vast human labor and sacrifice to maintain cornerstone machines that populate the Internet. The monitor is merely a window into the beginning of a much larger, complex, house of mirrors network of rabbit holes into the nature of the Internet we rely on.
Acknowledgements
Vivian K Beebe Sana
Prof. Elaine Treharne
Junha Hwang
Cameron Tenner
Masha Alekseeva
The Stanford English Department
The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis
The Stanford Mechanical Engineering Department
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and many others