On Content
To begin with, I needed content––the conventionally agreed core of digital publishing, to give the digital publishing context. Instead of niche texts pointing towards or directly embodying the good life, the primary requirement of the content was maximum accessibility and universality.
At this stage, I seemed to temporarily forgo the content’s alignment with the good life. Because of many ill-intended positions we have learned to be wary towards propagandas, and lecturing is unattractive. The desired effect of my practice, sprung from my position, could thus be achieved through a candid presentation of the most overt aspects of our collective conditions.
I started working with Donald Trump’s Twitter archive. Stripping away its original visual context, I put it in a plain format, in layouts of poetry, manipulated the interaction, along with other lightfooted experiments that orchestrate the content’s narrative. It was then pointed out by my peers that employing contents with pre-defined, recognisable formats was strong, as the shift of its habitat was starker and more resonating.
This recognition drove me towards the most ubiquitous kinds of contents that populate our digital lives––tweets, hashtags, news stories, YouTube’s comments, etc. These texts are unfiltered detritus left behind in the shadow of the grand cyber landscapes, most readily consumed by us, making up the most of the thousands of words we consume on a daily basis (reference pending). By focusing on them my iterative studio practice can resonate with my emerging position towards the good life.
Iterate Towards the Visual/Interactional Language
The iterative practice consists of manipulating the text and the interaction with which. My first action with the content was always a plaintext layout, stripping away the rhetoric and metalanguage belonging to their original (and usually imposing) habitats, giving the text unpretended candour, as well as me freedom for further iterations.
With Trump’s Twitter archive, the context of this content is charged with unambiguous emotions. Upon which I applied a layout usually reserved for poetry, not only dismantling the versal structure and the intonation, as well as the message.
Orchestrated user interaction was also a part of the iterative practice. Disrupting certain functions and features taken for granted (such as functioning hyperlinks, selectable and copyable texts) was a crucial part of the iteration, exploring how I can push the boundaries of interaction, and utilising them to bring forward my position. With news articles, I allowed users to arrange and display texts with their liking, inducing a more self-reflective reading experience.
In the experiments revolving around the BBC article on Brexit’s impact on Fishery, I decide to make the fisherman’s testimony the only non-interactable component on the webpage––for the fact that they are the most impacted demography, yet with the least voice.