Category: Uncategorised

The two dialogues conducted during the position through dialogues brief provided two varying perspectives. On one side Franca Lopez Barbara, a graphic designer provided me with to-the-point feedback on the video and a plethora of references and ideas. On the other Sean Hayes, an MA student in psychology supplied me with scientific insight into the phenomenon that my essay and inquiry are trying to explore and some personal experiences.

Franca, who has been exploring nature, coloniality, gender and ethics, offered a fresh perspective to the essay and positions that could be explored moving forward. Although she criticised the video essay, highlighting the infographic structure as being generic and boring, she appreciated the work that led to the creation of the video itself.

From exploring the inner workings of an algorithm to uncovering the politics and racial biases surrounding it, many of Franca’s suggestions intersected with her design practice on gender and ethnicity. We also debated how social media is being used as a tool to target people unfairly through profiling and physiognomy. She highlights the closed feedback loop that exists between the user, the content creator and the algorithm. Her suggestions and references opened new venues that could be researched and probed using design. She mentioned the work of Pati Sayuri (Crisis Flag, 2020), a project in which he used mapping to visualise and map affection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Franca talked about the participatory nature of the project. These also gave me the idea of using similar techniques to further my critical inquiry research.

During last year’s assessment, Max Colson provided me with a list of books to read on the topic of technology and its effects. One of the books, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (2011), discussed how the technology of any form, when used for a prolonged period, imparts a permanent and evolutionary change in the human mind on the neuron level. It led me to contact Sean Hayes, an MA in Psychology, who explored the effects of Social media on the human mind. He provided blanket feedback on the video, supporting some while rejecting other ideas mentioned in the essay. The dialogue led to a considerably different track, about not only the negative side but also the positive aspect of social media. He mentioned the tool as a boon in the way humans now communicate and cope with distances. He also recounts the result from the study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health journal (2020), which highlighted the negative effects of extended use of the technology. Sean also cited some of his personal accounts of using social media, and how it has led to some, not-so-great experiences and habits. In retrospect, the projects and the outputs created during this brief, have always looked on the negative side. and this dialogue provided me with contrasting aspects to focus on.

These two dialogues have opened a plethora of paths to venture out on. And the only thing left, as Franca said is “to follow the thread and surrender to it”.

Barbera, F. L. (2022).

Hayes, S. (2022).

Sayuri, P. (2020) crisis flag. a color map of feelings in times of covid-19. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/B_ivN4HnSnC/?hl=en.

Carr, N. (2011) The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. New York, NY: WW Norton.

Lee J, Ahn J-S, Min S, Kim M-H (2020) “Psychological Characteristics and Addiction Propensity According to Content Type of Smartphone Use,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(7). doi: 2292.

A Meta Comment on Social Media

Annotated Bibliography

Reading List

CHARLES JENCKS AND NATHAN SILVER
Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation
Cambridge: The MIT Press
[1972] 2013
Excerpt pp. 38–53

Like all things natural or mechanical, a product goes through a stage of Adhocism. Similar to what the authors explain, the process of creating the facial expression requires an ad-hoc approach. Individual vector shapes of eyes, mouth, and nose, establish several subsystems which are then used to create one totalistic facial expression. The positioning of these subsystems or vector shapes in relation to each other provided a wide range of emotional variations to be experimented with. The Dissectibility facet of Adhocism also applies to the vector facial expression, wherein one fully formed emotion can be broken apart and combined with other parts to form something different. The only difference is in the case of these vector facial expressions each and everyone is still a valid iteration and can all be termed as a totalistic product.

‘Literature down to a pixel’
Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation
Stanford: Stanford University Press
2017
pp. 165-195

“The digital dissolve into every day as all clocks, all books, all texts, in short, all human activity passes through some form of digital being.” (Pp. 169). Literature in a similar manner transition from a physical medium to a digital format. This changes how we interact with it. In the case of Twitter, the medium provides the user with information from around the world, from all topics and subjects in one single scroll. This provides the medium with an advantage when compared to a physical format. “Smoothness, in his view, is a property of the machine.”(pp. 170) But the publication produced in response removes the smoothness of the digital world and translates pixels into ink and paper making the audience examine the message and question the medium’s viability.

Projects/Practices

Real Feelings by HEK
HeK (House of Electronic Arts, Basel)
2020
Available on: [https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/virtual-exhibition-tour/]

Available on: [https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/virtual-exhibition-tour/]

This exhibition by HEK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) took place in the middle of the pandemic. Twenty artists came together to respond to the topic of technology and emotions. The exhibition showcases the effects positive or negative technology has had and will continue to have on us as human beings. A lot of these artworks highlighted how omnipresent technology has become in our daily lives, as a result of which, how we as human beings have adapted our emotional response to it. The artworks often used personification and exaggeration as a common theme to get the message across. This use of exaggeration and personification also helped my publication to get the desired result. This acted as one of my primary references and hence, through my project, I tried to respond to the body of work showcased in this exhibition.

Porsche Kelly
Social Media is a Killer of Emotions
TEDxOakland
2017
Available on: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z9tZCzrZsE]

Porsche Kelly also known as “The Poetic Activist” with this poem performed at TEDxOakland, uses strong words to highlight how technology, social media in particular, has made us killed our emotions. She, in her 4-minute performance, makes us wonder about the impact social media has on human emotions and how they are being desensitised with its overuse. With the world becoming a global village through social media, it is also disconnecting us from what is right next to us. Exposing users to things like murder and other graphic content that should not be seen next to a post about a new iPhone feature or an ad about a backpack. This was the topic that I explored in my response. Using the form of flip book-cum-publication to showcase the kind of emotional variance one goes through while scrolling through a Twitter feed. Is it okay for us as humans to go through this regularly? How does this impact us emotionally? Is this sort of emotional desensitisation good or bad?

External Reading

Paul Ekman
Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life.
Times Books/Henry Holt and Co.
2003

Emotions Revealed is a book exploring the topic of emotions and facial expressions. This book consists of the categorisation of five different kinds of emotions that humans project through the use of facial expressions. It explains these various emotions using a detailed explanation of the face and images to support the text. These detailed explanations were used to form a set of isolated vector shapes to then be used in combination to form a facial expression for my initial iteration of the faces. These, like the images in the book, acted as a tangible visual aid for the visual translation of the Twitter feed, to help the audience promptly grasp the emotion that the viewer of those tweets initially felt after reading them. This book makes a case of facial expressions as a language. Can these facial expressions get converted into simple vector shapes and still be used effectively? And can simple vector forms incorporate the nuances of a human face?

Jan Tschichold
The Form of the Book
On Books that are Too Wide, Too Large, or Square
Hartley & Marks Publishers
1995
pp. 166-169

This essay by Jan Tschichold, argues for the form of the book to be of a specific proportion and size while also providing supporting arguments and logical explanations for the rules. For a book to last and to be found again, it will have to confine to a set of rules in order for it not to end up in a waste bin. In my case, the publication, produced as part of the work, does not confine to the rule mentioned by Jan Tschichold. The book is too wide, too short, doesn’t have the name on the spine, and cannot be properly placed on the bookshelves. The publication form can be termed as experimental and in agreement with Jan Tschichold’s argument, it might not last long and will not be applicable to any other topics discourse.

Extended Writing

Paul Ekman
Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life.
Times Books/Henry Holt and Co.
2003

Paul Ekman in his work ‘Emotions Revealed’ explores the extent of human facial expressions. He uses text as his main means of discourse explaining the nuances of facial expressions in great detail, while also providing visual aids in the forms of images taken either in real-life situations or those taken with actors specifically for the book. Paul Ekman makes a case for facial expression being a language that is universal and breaks it down for easy understanding among its audiences. And one can argue that understanding facial expressions is a lost art in the digital age and a language that should be understood by everyone.

The book is divided into 10 chapters, starting with explaining how emotions and specifically facial expressions are largely universal, only showing a few discrepancies between a few of them. He concludes this, as a result of a year-long study he and his colleagues conducted in the US, Japan, and also New Guinea (an island in Australia). Emotions are developed as an evolutionary trait and have helped humankind survive for this long due to the emotional responses we generate to an outer stimulus. The author, through this medium, is not only trying to make the readers aware of the emotions they encounter in the world but also to help them understand their emotions. To react to them, and sometimes even try to control involuntary emotional responses.

He categorises human emotions under these five categories – Anger, Sadness, Enjoyment, Disgust, and Fear. Paul goes through each of these emotions individually in great detail. The main aim of every chapter is to make the reader more aware of these expressions when encountered in real life. He takes an example of the photos from actual situations where a particular expression was displayed. Furthermore, he uses the same set of male and female actors to allow for an easy comparison of the facial expressions between the various chapters. Each emotion is displayed on a wide spectrum of intensity, causing a lot of the neutral or low-intensity states of different emotions to merge into each other. These images and text were a part of my initial exploration in creating the vector faces, that were then used as a translation device responding to textual information posted online, especially Twitter in this case. According to the book, every emotion has a particular facial feature that ends up playing a pivotal role, for example, sadness is revealed through raised inner eyebrows, contracted cheeks and widened lips. These sorts of detailed explanations, without any kind of technical jargon, make this book accessible to all academic and non-academic readers, which is not the case with numerous books written in this field of study. In the end, the book also asks the user to interact with the book by asking them to identify a set of images and categories according to the emotions that they display, testing the audience on what they have learned to decipher facial expressions.

Although Paul Ekman is a well-known psychologist, some of his critics argue that facial expression by itself only tells half the story and a lot of the context is hidden in the body language. To this day, his book is used by government organisations, field researchers and the public as a way to better understand the ever-expanding field of Emotions and Facial expressions.

Real Feelings by HEK
HeK (House of Electronic Arts, Basel)
2020
Available on: [https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/virtual-exhibition-tour/]

Real Feelings – Emotions and Technology, was an exhibition by HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel), that was initially held in August 2020. A total of 20 artists from around the globe took part in this exhibition, trying to tackle the subject of emotions and how it relates and interacts with technology. Surprisingly for an exhibition on this topic, the artworks were dominantly anchored to the present world, most of the artwork responding to the current scenarios rather than to the future. My experience of this exhibition took place through a virtual tour hosted by the director of HEK, Sabine Hinnelsbach, who with two other Co-curators curated this exhibition. Therefore, getting a sense of the environment and the placement of the artworks in response to each other was rather difficult. As this exhibition was happening in the middle of the pandemic, a lot of work responded to isolation and emotional detachment during that period.

The very first thing visible at the entrance was a set of six screens with various emotions listed on them, this was a project called Vibe Check by Lauren lee McCarthy & Kyle McDonald. This, like a lot of the other projects, was created for Real feelings. In their project, they placed several cameras all around the exhibition space and using AI monitored the audience’s facial expressions in real-time and categorised them under 6 different categories through sentiment analysis which was then displayed on the screen. This at the very onset of the exhibition gave a sense of how omnipresent technology is not only in this exhibition but in the outside world as well. A lot of these artworks used personification through animation and interactive instalments, as a common theme to impart emotions within an inanimate object to highlight the way we interact with our devices nowadays. One of the artworks was 5 frames placed next to each, with portraits of robots and humans named ‘One of them is Human’ which asked the audience to identify the image that was of a human and not a robot. This not only terrified me but also made me marvel at the level that we have reached in recreating human-like forms. This sort of arrangement made the audience look deep and analyse all the images to identify (if they could) the one that was human. Another artwork is named a Solitary Survival raft, an instalment consisting of a raft-like structure. This raft’s outer covering would either inflate to form a tent or vacuum out all the air to form a tight suction with the user’s body, acting as an intimacy tool for the user. These artworks highlighted the emotional deficit that people in the current digital world are going through and how technology is now filling in those gaps.

Several of these artworks acted as a replacement for humans to connect emotionally and physically. A virtual reality scenario, wherein the user finds love in the virtual world through an AI rather than in real life, makes us ask how viable a replacement technology can be moving forward. 

Feedback – Emotional Rollercoaster

What’s working
-connection to social media (desensitizing, emotional exhaustion
-time span differences(reading a publication(long) vs. scrolling”short 3 mins”)
-the characters acts like an echo chamber/filter effect reflecting the feature of social media
-great innovative binding
-the immediacy of the flip book fits with the pace of social media

What’s not working
-if showing the tweet feed necessary? (Do we need to be told to be sad for something)
-the publication’s less clear/tangible than the flip book
-the form of publication doesn’t have not enough coherence to the subject matter
-more information can be provide in the simplified response

What’s next
-tag different feeling to one tweet(different )
-add emotional complexity
-map emotional response instead of fixing them, use them as face tags/research tools
-survey

Line of Enquiry

The first week started off with a lot of confusion and worry about the long-term effects of the brief we were about to start. The idea was to start off creating a set of iterations, leading up to a 100 of them one after the another. So for this particular brief, I selected the face masks that I touched upon in the Methods of translation brief. Using the mask and the faces as my snippet, I started creating a set of simple vector shapes that would be used to then create masks to depict varied emotions. These shapes took the shape of emotions due to a phenomenon called Pareidolia. Even a small changes in the shape’s position, size, or shape gave a different emotion. Following these initial information, I was inspired by the project “double trouble” that used the shapes to depict hidden emotions, and wanted to use these faces so created in the first week as a translation device for a film. For this particular set, I chose “The Lighthouse” as my source material. At the end of these iterations i was left with a small publication with the goal to see whether the shapes will depict the same emotions even when the pareidolia effect is broken. There still remains for me to create a system where these faces, can be used as a translation device for other mediums, reliably and with less and less arbitrary decisions.

Annotated Bibliography

RAYMOND QUENEAU
Exercises in Style
London: John Calder
[1947] 1998, pp. 17–26

With Exercise in Style, RAYMOND QUENEAU, taking in the same set of inputs, i.e., the story and arranges the story in different form and structure to create different emotions for the reader as he reads it. It serves as a good example of how changes within the structure of the writing can change the readers’ perspective immensely. This seems to apply to the faces iterations as well, although not literary like the Exercise in style, changes made in the structure, size, or the placement of the iteration can change the way the audience perceives the face. And the possible combinations and variations are endless.

ANDREW BLAUVELT, LUNA MAURER, EDO PAULUS, JONATHAN PUCKEY, AND ROEL WOUTERS
Conditional Design Workbook
Amsterdam: Valiz, 2013, Excerpt pp. ii–xiv

In their Manifesto, the authors emphasise on the importance of process and how it is the product itself. Using Input as our material and logic as our tool, they want us to avoid random and arbitrary decision. Thus, creating a world of design that represents the here and now rather than reminiscing about the past. The system used for the second set of iterations used some rules, but was still relying on arbitrary and subjective decision by the translator. But that being said, is it even possible to create a system for such a task, that of translating emotions from one plane to another?

Wodehouse, A., Brisco, R., Broussard, E., & Duffy, A. (2018).
Pareidolia: characterising facial anthropomorphism and its implications for product design.
Journal of Design Research, 16(2), 83-98.
Available at: [https://pureportal.strath.ac.uk/en/publications/pareidolia-characterising-facial-anthropomorphism-and-its-implica]

The Pareidolia effect by definition is the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognisable images, especially faces, in random arrangement of objects or shapes. This research paper extensively explores this phenomenon and how it affects the realm of product design. The fact that a set of shapes or objects arranged randomly can make the viewer connect it to a face can influence the emotion of the audience towards the said object. This is the phenomenon that my initial iterations took advantage of, using seeming random shapes to draw the attention of the audience to recognise it as a face showing complex emotions. The question that arises here is would the same set of shapes carry the same emotion when the pareidolia effect is intentionally broken by shuffling them around?

Vladimir Nabokov
The Art of Translation
August 4, 1941
Available at: [https://newrepublic.com/article/62610/the-art-translation]

This text, written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1941, describe three kinds of evils when it comes to translating a material, in this case literary. The first is being ignorant, second intentionally skipping parts of the material and the third and the worst, conforming the material according to ones wish and prejudices. Although the article focuses on the translation of written material, these principles can also be applied to other forms of translation, even the ones happening between two different mediums. Vladimir focuses on the fact that translator should not deceit the audience by hiding or omitting or masking information while translating the material. He also directs the attention towards how a bad translation can change the meaning that the original material’s author was trying to convey. All these considerations also come in when trying to use vector shapes as masks to translate emotions from an image or text, and the translator, in this case being I, will inevitably commit one of these evils while doing so.

Ekta, LUNDGREN+LINDQVIST, Sweden
160 Faces, 2019
Available at: [https://bpando.org/2020/09/23/art-book-design-ekta/]

Ekta in his project “160 Faces” drew 160 faces with a crayon and then ripped all of them in half only to reconstruct them in random order, forming a complex and varied set of faces. The project provided an interesting perspective on how even a small, accidental dot by Ekta within the circle can change how a person/audience perceives the emotion projected on the paper. The seemingly random squiggly lines transform the area within the circle into a playground of emotions, operating within the area of the Pareidolia effect. The studio LUNDGREN+LINDQVIST with the algorithmic sequencing provides each publication and its reader with a unique reading experience, giving the control of how the audience will read this book in the hand of an algorithm. Visually similar to the initial set of iteration, the collage nature and the publication algorithm provide this project by Ekta with a lot of depth.

Giacomo Favilla, Valeria Crociata
Double Trouble, 2017
Available at: [https://www.eyemagazine.com/blog/post/seeing-double]

With this project, photographer and videographer Giacomo Favilla and graphic designer and illustrator Valeria Crociata, try to question the authenticity of the content on social media. The tried to achieve this by using varied colours shapes as an overlay over the photographs to showcase a lot more information in a seemingly fun way. This project also touches upon the message that people on social media are wearing metaphorical masks to promote something that is not authentic and hiding their true-self. The combination of the images and bright-vectors and geometric shapes doesn’t give the subject any choice on how they are portrayed in the fabricated realm of social media. But can these vector forms, these mask, act as a translation device, and can it be used without making the subject humorous?

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Re-contextualising Anti-Homeless Spikes

For the second week of the brief we ended up working in isolation, while still using the team members as bouncing board for the ideas. WE developed several experimentation in relation to our own practice and position.

Experiment 1

Using the shape of the spike to divert the attention of the public to actual solution that could help solve the problem of homelessness rather than hiding it.

Experiment 2

Using the form of the spikes to
depict a contradicting idea.

Experiment 3

Using a Poster to help homeless people find the nearest homeless shelter in the vicinity.
Using the spike as a visual device to point in the right direction.

Creative Coding- Processing,js

The initial exploration focused on creating a common object that one sees everyday, so I chose chairs to recreate in processing while learning the ropes. The method of discourse included a poster wit h the output on the front and code on the back.

The last iteration, in the first week, was a dumb bot that would go around the screen bouncing of off an invisible chair, thus creating a border outside the chair. But due to a bug, it started creating these stippled patterns from within the shape of the chair. Thus leaving this organic output.

Week 1

For this brief, I chose creative coding as my material to iterate with. To learn the in’s and out’s of the tool, for the initial exploration I decided to imitate a chair with as many coding solutions as possible. Though the iterations started out simple, but each iteration got a bit more complicated and ended up creating something that I had not planned for. The complexity and the learning curve of the tool, helps the user, unintentionally, to find more such accidental discoveries.

Week 2

Reference

Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation, [1972]

Week 3

The methods of iterations started with a quick dive into what iteration can be seen in different ways. The goal being to create iterations by selecting a specific material or tool (something that you haven’t experimented with before) and reaching a new level of skill, knowledge, or mastery with every passing iteration. For this particular brief, I decided to go with creative coding, specifically the processing.js library, as my tool/material.

The initial exploration revolved around getting to know the software and play around with the basic knowledge that I could gather in the first week. I tried to figure out a way of drawing a chair in 7 seven different styles, each style getting a bit complicated as the knowledge started to pile up. Each of the initial iterations took inspiration from already existing codes, available either in print or on the web. The last iteration of the first week left me with a question, how can we use code to imitate nature? The following week, I tried creating an iteration that not only tried to imitate nature but also took in inputs through various sources to react accordingly and something natural would. Using naturally occurring numbers to create a few instances. The thing that I realised is nature seems mysterious to us because we don’t know all the variables that are at play and how those variables or things form a cause and effect relationship. Nature is random for us, just because it’s too complex.

Drawing from the previous realisation, I decided to create two separate iterations that would try and recreate some of natures behaviour, using a lot of variables making the audience or the viewer think of it as random, but under the wraps it would contain the necessary code to decipher it. First was a simulation of two of life’s main processes, food, and reproduction. In this iteration, the bot went around the canvas hunting for food and mates to reproduce with, trying to survive as a species. The second, however, acts more of a record keeping tree, growing only when provided with passive inputs and taking inputs from various sources to create an event map, to depict the condition that was there when the dot was made.

For writing the code for the simulation, a passive decision was made to colour code blocks into pink and blue to signify their gender. Why Pink and blue, though? Because of someone in the past decided to make that decision and people followed. Where mass subjectivity became objective after a point, something that people now think is sacrosanct. Because of the same reason I implicitly decided to colour code my bots in the colour scheme. All that is solid, an article my Michael Rock (2016) touches on the same point, of how “Once established its almost impossible to think outside the systems and structures they represent”.
This is not only true regarding gender, but also when it comes to design tools and materials. Several tools have a style associated with it, a look or pattern of output, which in some cases maybe because of technical limitations or other uncontrollable factors but a lot of it can be associated with the pattern that was established by early designers using that tool. And because of that it becomes a lot more difficult for a designer or a user to look outside it, to break it.

References

Michael Rock, All That is Solid…, [2016]

Feedback: Written by Amandine Forest

• like that you’re taking natural processes and put it in the opposite scenario (digital)
• The way tree are growing ++
• Good base to push further/ can do a lot with it
• If you follow the process of translation it can be v open, go further
• Transforming something organic in coding +
• Tree iteration ++++ because its uses the idea of a tree
• Focus and open enquiry +++ > open to let the process create your result
• To what extend coding can engage with organic processes?
• Very rigorous / you’ve put in a lot of work
• Whats the role and function of the game? How would you keep the user engage?
• 2nd iteration ++++ really exciting = really a graphic communication design outcome // we’re seeing a poster being designed // how to develop? Give the audience More interactivity + date stamps ? // how to develop the text aspect? Change the way the text is presented in relation to the variables? How are the directions chosen? Could be more related to the variables // it is almost data visualisation of an environment at a particular moment in time and space > to what extend is it bout data visualisation? 
• What could it be sue for? // what do we learn? // select an environment?