I spent the early part of the day completing a submission to the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference. In the absence of any newly resolved work, I duplicated the unsuccessful proposal I made to ISEA. I’m not holding out much hope, but did want to get something in by the deadline.
Later, a small group of PhD students did a show and tell of new work in progress in the S1 studio. There was a lot to be learned for me from showing a very incomplete and inaccessible piece of work. It uses computer usage data to create an aesthetic visualisation of that usage, but is a bit messy in its thinking: the idea of the ON and OFF signs was to indicate whether someone was on or offline, but this already seems like a pointless effort when digital device usage is so blended. The complexity of the staging, with data not being visible, also confounded the reading of the work.
As a result I restaged it in my studio (see above) and this feels like it has a bit more potential. The inadequacy of the means of representation of online or offline status is foregrounded by bad workmanship (flickering light) but the sense that there is something organic at the heart of it comes across in the representation of mouse movement. In this case it looks like a spotlight or like saccades – a layer of distraction on top of the objects.
I need to move on from this piece now and into the data in more depth – gathering days worth of data and creating more static visualisations of their complexity.