This repository serves as a living project proposal and holds the documentation for my senior capstone project to finish my degree at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts.
In 1-3 paragraphs, describe your project in as much detail as you can, using as simple and direct language as possible. Avoid jargon. Some questions to consider: What are your main questions/influences? What ideas ground your research? What form does the project take? Why is the work urgent, necessary, relevant today? Who is the ideal audience / what community is the project most accountable to? Also include the rough scale and size that you have in mind. This will help think about how the projects will come together in the show.
It feels important to me to begin any explanation of this project with a contextualization within my larger interest in the relationship between print and digital media. I think that there is untapped potential between these modalities of media, and part of the motivation behind this project is to increase awareness of the particularities of each, in the hope that we can collaboratively unlock more. maybe thats super pretentious but it wouldnt really be my project if there wasnt some sort of aspect about educating people about something.
My aunt is an archivist/librarian. She currently works at the Bancroft Library (UCB), but before that, she worked at the GLBT Historical Society Archives in San Francisco. I remember her talking about how the archive was interested in collecting any ephemera relating to queerness in san francisco, from flyers handed out at demonstrations, to educational pamphlets given out during pride. This was an important moment for me, because I realized that all this information i took for granted or threw out was valuable. It was an important part of ensuring future understanding of the current state of the world. Thankfully for my future roomates and my parent's basement, i didnt take this to mean that I had to keep little piece of printed paper that crossed through my hands, but I did begin to appreciate the quotidian information we take for granted more.
Later, I began to realize that the internet functioned in the same way
The general idea is to create a program that enables us to archive the web in a physical and personal way. I have long thought that zines are a beautifully human way of conveying information, so I decided to use that form for this project. My goal is to create a system that will take a webpage as input and will parse its central contents and then let the user organize the information, which then gets exported in a print ready form. The software should work with any output method, but for my project specifically, I chose to use a pen plotter. I think that the choice of a pen plotter fits into my idea well because it is an older form of printing technology which is somewhat simpler, and thereby more robust, than todays laser and inkjet printers. Using a plotter also aids in the perception of the zines a keepable object, because a plotter traces the paths of the content on a page in a manner tangibly similar to the way that we draw as humans, which makes it seem much more unique, and less disposable.
this project aims mainly to make people think about the ephemeral nature of internet media. I also offer a solution, although perhaps overly whimsical.
So far, I have been working on the plotter build, focusing on whatever comes up. It has been taking somewhat longer than I had anticipated.
Overall, I would like to be finished with the plotter build by the end of week 3. This goal is a bit aspirational but I have the majority of my materials ready, so I think it is possible.
Over the last week or so, I have begun to think more and more about the web aspect of my project. I have made significant progress on the plotter, and the website is the next step. I still am not sure when
The timeline is located in a project attached to this repo
- What is the reason to use a plotter for this?
- How do I make this useful in a community sense, while still having it be self contained in a physical way?
- I realized that the purpose of archiving for oneself is only a superficial part of the real purpose of this project. Because by definition archiving is for other people. Additionally, the action of curating the content for the zine will make that information more available in that person's brain because the act of curation serves as a new way of processing the information cognitively which strengthens the neural representation of the information (i can cite something if yall want me to but its also common sense to some extent).
- If the main purpose of the archiving is to ensure other people continue to have access to the information, how can i build a process into my system to faciliate this sharing of information down the line?
- What system of values do I want this to bealigned with
- How do I center and acknowledge the paradoxical nature of this project in terms of the fact that it is not really possible to collapse the possibilities of the internet into
- I just need to make this conflict clear because thats one of the biggest points of the piece is that there are certain cualities of each of these media that arent representable in the other. -- that is the educational aspect of the piece.
The materials for this project, as well as fabricated component quantities are stored in my BOM spreadsheet.
when do i need to complete this by? the midterm? i should make a mockup ui in figma probably
how am I supposed to format this
All of the documentation for this project lives inside of the documentation folder. The following are links to subfolders of that folder for quick access to parts of the documentation.
- The plotter
- research
- fabrication
- testing
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- Inspiration
- Puzzle
- Interface
- The Exhibition
- ideas
I have been collecting sources pertaining to this project and my greater interest in the relationship between print and digital media in this raindrop collection
Ive curated a selection of visual inspirations for this project in this folder