RR haiku 224
i should be
i’m not
why not
Notes on Abstract Browsing
Abstract Browsing is a project that consists of both software and physical objects.
The browser plugin is a free software that anyone can install.
When you turn it on, you can surf the web but all web content is reduced to colored rectangles. It shows you the skeleton of the web. It’s like seeing an X-ray of a building, showing the structural elements.
Web pages are built of many smaller elements, information is organized and categorized. Text, images, tables, things we use every day but are not aware of.
I’m interested how our eyes move across the screen, how websites adapt, learn from your behavior, and change over time. Optimized to grab your attention, to never get boring, to tempt you to click and click and never leave.
Websites are constantly maximizing their efficiency, separate from aesthetic concerns. Websites learn from users by trial and error.
Technology asks new questions about composition. I’m looking for unusual compositions. Anti-compositions, unhuman compositions, compositions that humans would not have created on their own.
I surf the web every day using the plugin. Whenever I find a composition that strikes me, I take a screenshot. Just like digital photography, I take way too many images, thousands and thousands. The real challenge is editing. Making tapestries out of these compositions forces me to choose. Out of all the files I have, I have to choose which ones become objects.
The physicalization (weaving) brings focus. The software is fast and fluid, textile is expensive and slow. It slows me down, it helps me to pause and reflect.
I’ve tried to spend less time on the computer
turning procrastination into productivity
finding beauty in utility
abstraction => removal of information
from natural perception to material reduction
distraction based compositions
infinite information – infinite compositions
the aesthetics of distraction
abstraction is an escape
appropriated abstraction
weaving => mechanical painting
From Wikipedia
“The Jacquard head used replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations. It is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware. The ability to change the pattern of the loom’s weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming and data entry.
Charles Babbage knew of Jacquard looms and planned to use cards to store programs in his Analytical engine. In the late 19th century, Herman Hollerith took the idea of using punched cards to store information a step further when he created a punched card tabulating machine which he used to input data for the 1890 U.S. Census.”
Appropriation
ap·pro·pri·a·tion
əˌprōprēˈāSH(ə)n/
noun
the action of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission.
Is appropriation a form of bullying?
Instead of making something, taking something.
The appropriated one is usually not happy.
The villain is more interesting than the hero.
What does contextualize really mean?
– to bring focus
– to isolate
– to show something that is not art to an art audience
– to present something you did not make in an empty room
Appropriation deals with intellectual hierarchy.
Creation looks naïve next to appropriation.
haiku book 2016
Published by Rollo Press, 160 pages, full color, 11 x 16 cm.
BUY IT HERE ——> Idea Books
Between 2013 and 2015, Rafaël Rozendaal formulated a series of haiku as non-physical artworks that jump from one medium to another. Written on his phone, they first appeared as tweets, then as posts on his blog and Instagram, and later as wall paintings in exhibition spaces and collectors’ homes. Published in conjunction with the exhibition ‘DOings&kNOTs’ at Tallinn Art Hall, curated by Margit Säde, this offset edition reproduces Rozendaal’s wry and terse commentary on various aspects of our digital age and society, from full inboxes, oversaturation of information, and hyper-capitalist drive, to mundane routines, desires, and frustrations.
