User:Kiara/Second Assessment

Past

Special Issue 25: Sounds of Making

Context

In collaboration with Radio WORM we hosted radio shows for 2 months and crafted projects relating to sound.

One of the shows I took part in was Lost Music; together with Chrissy, Charlie, Tessa and Imina we collected songs from our classmates, following different instructions. We decided to burn CDs with the songs on them and to make a website to allow people to download the songs without needing any music-streaming platform. The whole project took great visual inspiration in late 90s - early 2000s aesthetics. The website itself is inspired by tumblr blogs that allowed autoplay music when anyone would enter the website.

Lost in Narration is the final project I took part in, where we put together a looping chain of discourse:

2 narrators write the script > 2 speakers read the script into microphones > the read material is captured by a speech-to-text python script and printed by a receipt printer > the read material is simultaneously transformed into sound, captured by VCV Rack 2.

The idea was to have a never-stopping live scripting, that acts as a (fictional) archive of the Special Issue's public event and to play with language as a material.

Key concepts I take from it

• small web/indie web (hand coded),
• open access, piracy as a sharing method
• connection between the body and the machine and their placement in a determined space
• failure as a creative material: the python script doesn't fully recognises the words, depending on accent, dictation, etc.
• language intricacies, interpretation, translation, intention: what you mean is not necessarily what will be understood

Links: Lost_in_Narration --- SI 25 website --- https://hub.xpub.nl/cerealbox/~kiara/lost-music/

Special Issue 26: Display & Position

Context

in collaboration with artist and researcher Doriane Timmermans, we spent 3 months working on CSS manipulation, with a specific focus on the display and position properties. This Special Issue was integrated as part of her [declarations.style] research project, focusing on the materiality and poetry of the CSS language.

Key concepts I take from it

• CSS as a language, before being a programming language --> syntax, meaning, vocabulary, etc.
• Writing websites <> writing poetry/fiction/...
• Web programming as a craft
• Interpretation, subjectivity

Links: User:Kiara/Special_Issue_26 --- Specific Lens: browser extension --- Supervisual Hyperzine: an archive of SI26 --- https://declarations.style

External works

My own practice of web crafting

Since 5 years now I have been playing around with web languages, mostly HTML and CSS, to create web material but also printed objects. I learn constantly, as it is an ever-evolving practice.

Looking back at my own work, some key concepts keep being present:

• playfulness
• puzzle/enigma aspect
• language

So I safely assume that they will also exist in the project I am now working on...

Present

Starting point: I started by considering working on topics revolving around community, collaboration and such, but this axis was missing something. It was at the same time too broad and hard to narrow down and to restrictive. It was lacking the things that drive me as a person: language and magic.

Key concepts I'm investigating:

1. What do you I mean by magic

Future

The ideal project:

The ideal thesis: