Home » open education resources

Tag: open education resources

NET-ART OS: An Experiment in Archive Discovery

NET-ART OS: An Experiment in Archive Discovery

6-5-2026

Since 2017, the NET-ART website here on the CUNY Academic Commons has grown into a substantial collection of teaching materials, tutorials, art works, software resources, project ideas, assignments, technology references, collaborations, reflections on digital art, design, and emerging media and more!

Over the years, the archive continued to expand. New content was added regularly, categories evolved, and hundreds of posts accumulated. Like many long-running educational websites, the archive became increasingly valuable, but also increasingly difficult to fully explore.

This led me to a simple question:

How can a large educational archive become more discoverable without changing the archive itself?

That question became the starting point for a new experiment called NET-ART OS.

 

What Is NET-ART OS?

NET-ART OS is an experimental command-line archive discovery system built on top of the public NET-ART archive. Rather than replacing the website, it creates an additional layer that helps explore, search, organize, and better understand the content that already exists.

The goal is not to redesign the archive.

The goal is to make the archive easier to explore, and to curiously see what that potential of that is, in and of itself.

 

How The Project Began

The project began as a conversation about academic archives, discovery, and interdisciplinary learning.

What would happen if a long-running educational website could be ingested, organized locally, and explored through new forms of search and analysis? We have the tools, indeed.

Could patterns emerge that were difficult to see through traditional website navigation?

Could archives become more useful as they grow rather than more difficult to navigate?

To explore these questions, I began building a local prototype called NET-ART OS.

 

Building The First Prototype

The first version of NET-ART OS was developed locally on my MacBook Pro using Claude Code running directly within Terminal.

The goal was to create a lightweight system capable of:

  • Ingesting public NET-ART content
  • Organizing content locally
  • Performing archive-wide searches
  • Generating archive statistics
  • Exploring relationships between topics
  • Creating timeline views of archive activity
  • Exporting archive data for future research and experimentation

The development process involved building, testing, debugging, and validating the system directly against the public NET-ART archive.

 

 

The Technology Stack

NET-ART OS currently uses:

  • Claude Code
  • macOS Terminal
  • Python
  • SQLite
  • Typer CLI Framework
  • HTTPX
  • BeautifulSoup
  • SQLite Full Text Search (FTS5)
  • JSON exports
  • CSV exports

The project architecture also includes a framework for future experimentation with language models and semantic search, although these capabilities are not required for the current functionality.

At its core, NET-ART OS is an archive discovery tool.

 

Initial Results

The first successful ingest of the public NET-ART archive produced:

  • 598 total records
  • 587 posts
  • 11 pages
  • 97,587 words
  • 19 categories
  • 426 tags

The archive currently spans content published between 2017 and 2026.

Once ingested, the archive could be explored as a unified collection rather than a series of individual web pages.

 

Current Features

The prototype currently supports:

*Archive Statistics

*Generate summaries of archive size, content types, categories, tags, and publication dates.

*Archive Search

*Search across the entire archive from a single interface.

*Timeline Exploration

*View archive activity across multiple years.

*Topic Connections

*Explore relationships between categories, tags, and topics.

*Data Export

*Export archive content for future analysis and experimentation.

 

Why This Matters

Many educational websites and academic archives face a similar challenge.

As content grows, discovery becomes more difficult.

Important materials remain available but become harder to locate.

Connections between ideas often remain hidden.

NET-ART OS explores whether a discovery layer can help reveal those connections.

 

For example:

A student interested in accessibility might discover related content involving digital storytelling, virtual reality, interface design, or creative technology.

An educator might identify recurring themes that emerged across multiple years of teaching materials.

A researcher might uncover unexpected relationships between topics that were never intentionally linked together.

The archive remains the same.

The pathways through the archive expand. (insert image of a lightbulb above your head for the idea that you just had, yes?)

 

Looking Forward

NET-ART OS remains an experiment.

The current version is intentionally lightweight and local.

Future directions may include:

  • Semantic search
  • Enhanced relationship mapping
  • Visual exploration interfaces
  • Interdisciplinary discovery tools
  • Archive comparison tools
  • Additional export and research features

The larger question remains open:

How might we help people discover more within the archives they already maintain?

 

Early Discoveries from the Archive

Once the initial prototype was built and the NET-ART archive was successfully ingested, I began testing the system against real course content spanning nearly a decade of teaching, writing, exhibitions, assignments, and creative experiments (images, GIFS,etc).

The results were surprisingly revealing:

“Virtual Reality” is Connected to Teaching, Storytelling, and Exhibition Design

A search and connection analysis around “Virtual Reality” revealed that VR is not an isolated topic within the archive. Instead, it consistently appears alongside:

• AR / VR
• Video Art & New Media
• Teaching Resources
• Digital Storytelling
• Exhibition Design
• Open Educational Resources (OER)

The archive effectively mapped a conceptual journey from early writings about augmented reality and “default reality” in 2017 through public AR projects, educational resources, and ultimately into recent virtual exhibitions and mixed reality studio experiments.

What emerged was not simply a collection of VR posts, but an intellectual thread spanning multiple years of creative and educational practice.

 

“Accessibility” and “Deaf Culture” Form a Core Theme

One of the most compelling discoveries emerged from exploring Deaf culture and accessibility-related content.

The system identified recurring relationships between:

• American Sign Language (ASL)
• Accessibility
• Inclusion
• Communication
• Learning
• Community

Rather than appearing as isolated awareness posts, Deaf culture and accessibility were revealed as recurring themes embedded throughout teaching resources, writing assignments, exhibitions, and digital art projects.

This confirmed something that category counts alone could never reveal: accessibility is not a side topic within the archive. It is one of its foundational values.

 

The Archive Reveals Its Own Evolution

The timeline analysis surfaced an unexpected narrative arc across nearly ten years of content:

  • 2017–2019 were dominated by high-volume experimentation with GIFs, Net Art, and Digital Art.
  • From 2020 onward, the archive shifted toward fewer but significantly longer essays and reflective writing.
  • By 2026, Artificial Intelligence, Teaching Resources, and Creative Technology emerged as dominant themes.

Without any manual tagging or interpretation, the archive revealed a visible progression:

GIF Experiments → Digital Art Essays → AI, Creative Technology, and Teaching

In many ways, the archive became a form of self-documentation, exposing patterns and intellectual trajectories that would have been difficult to identify manually.

 

Why This Matters

The goal of NET-ART OS is not simply to search archives more efficiently.

Its larger purpose is to help educators, artists, students, researchers, and Digital Humanities practitioners discover unexpected relationships hidden within large collections of public knowledge.

Rather than replacing human interpretation, systems like this can help reveal new pathways for inquiry, interdisciplinary learning, curriculum development, and creative research.

The most exciting outcome so far is that the archive is already teaching us something new about itself.

 

An Invitation

If you maintain a teaching archive, research archive, course website, digital humanities project, or long-running collection of public content, I encourage you to consider experimenting with similar approaches.

What patterns might emerge from your archive?

What connections remain hidden?

What new forms of exploration become possible when an archive is treated as a collection of relationships rather than simply a collection of pages?

 

NET-ART OS began as a small experiment built in a single day. (lol)

I am excited to see where it leads next.

NET-ART OS began as an experiment in archive discovery, but it quickly became something else. As the system analyzed nearly a decade of course materials, exhibitions, assignments, and creative research, it revealed patterns that were previously invisible. At the same time, the NET-ART archive itself is evolving into a record of a much larger cultural transition: from digital art and net art toward AI, archives, agents, mixed reality, and new forms of human-machine collaboration. In that sense, the archive is no longer just documenting history. It is documenting the emergence of the future as it happens.

This project was developed entirely through a human–AI collaborative workflow using Claude Code running locally on a personal workstation. The resulting system operates as a local-first archive discovery tool, demonstrating how emerging AI-assisted development practices can support research, teaching, and public scholarship.

 

NET-ART Required Readings – Full Update

Required Reading and Resource Familiarity

Updated June 5th 2026 – (the page itself is here)

Welcome back to yet another major update to the Net-Art website.. your summer reading has been assigned.

This is a living list. Please help us add to it! Resources are grouped by territory rather than chronology, because the work this course covers now spans too many adjacent practices to manage as a single flat list. Skim what is unfamiliar. Bookmark what is useful. Email or comment with additions and corrections.

Academic Essays, Critical Writing, and Scholarly Hubs

For students, researchers and practitioners who want the deeper reading. A curated set of foundational and current essays on net art, post-internet practice, AI image culture, and the politics of the screen, plus the hubs where ongoing critical writing actually lives. Most of what follows is freely available on the open web. A few items are behind academic paywalls and worth knowing about even if you cannot read them today.

  • Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” (e-flux journal #10, 2009): one of the most-cited essays of the past fifteen years on digital images, compression, circulation, and the politics of resolution.
  • Olia Lialina, “A Vernacular Web” (2005): the foundational essay on the visual and structural culture of the pre-Web 2.0 internet, by one of net art’s earliest and most enduring voices.
  • Olia Lialina, “Turing Complete User” (2012): a defense of the user as a category in an era of platform-mediated computing. Pairs naturally with “A Vernacular Web.”
  • Gene McHugh, “Post Internet” (2009-2010, restored by Rhizome in 2019): the blog that introduced the term “post-internet” into critical discourse, preserved and re-presented as part of the Net Art Anthology.
  • Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet” (2010): a key statement of the post-internet position, arguing that an image and its physical instantiation should be treated as continuous rather than separate objects.
  • Lev Manovich: long-time theorist of new media, software studies, and AI culture. His full essay archive lives at manovich.net and is freely downloadable. Start with “The Language of New Media” (book) and his more recent writing on AI and cultural analytics.
  • e-flux journal essays on AI and image culture: extensive recent writing by Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Joanna Zylinska, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Yuk Hui and others on machine vision, generative imagery, and the politics of synthetic media. Browse the journal archive by year for current writing.
  • Rhizome Editorial: Rhizome’s ongoing editorial archive, with substantial critical writing by Michael Connor, Aria Dean, Ceci Moss, and others on net art history, preservation, and current practice.
  • Outland: the most sustained serious critical writing on crypto art, on-chain practice, and decentralized culture as it actually unfolds.
  • Institute of Network Cultures (Geert Lovink et al.): ongoing academic publishing on network culture, platform critique, and digital labor. Many books are free PDF downloads.
  • Monoskop: a remarkable open archive of art and media theory texts, with an enormous library of out-of-print and otherwise hard-to-find scholarly material on net art, conceptual art, and media theory.
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935): not net art, but the essay every conversation about reproducibility, aura, AI generation, and digital copies eventually circles back to. Many translations are freely available online; the Marxists Internet Archive hosts one at marxists.org.
  • Public Books: serious accessible criticism on technology, image culture, and contemporary art, written by academics for general readers.
  • Logic(s) Magazine: critical writing on technology, labor, and culture from a left perspective, with frequent crossover into art and image politics.
  • Real Life: essays on living with technology, including the visual and design dimensions, archived since 2016 (note: the publication paused in 2022 but the archive remains a significant resource).

A note on access. e-flux journal, Rhizome, Outland, Public Books, Logic, Real Life, and Monoskop are all open access. Many academic journals (October, Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, New Media and Society) sit behind institutional paywalls. If you are a CUNY student or faculty member, the CUNY library system gives you access to most of those. If you are not affiliated with a university, the Internet Archive Scholar at scholar.archive.org and Google Scholar are reasonable starting points for tracking down open versions of paywalled work.

 

Continued -> More Net-Art History and Critical Writing

Foundational and ongoing context for where the practice came from and where it is going.

  • Rhizome: the longest-running organization devoted to born-digital art, affiliated with the New Museum. Editorial archive, commissions, scholarship, and digital preservation work.
  • Rhizome Net Art Anthology: one hundred restored works of net art with critical essays, organized chronologically from the 1980s through the present.
  • UBU WEB: Kenneth Goldsmith’s vast free archive of avant-garde film, video, sound, and writing. Still one of the most essential resources on the open web.
  • e-flux journal: the leading critical journal on contemporary art, frequently engaging with digital, networked, and AI-era practice.
  • Outland: a publication dedicated to crypto and blockchain art criticism, the most serious sustained writing on the subject.
  • The Wrong Biennale: a recurring international online biennial that maps active net art and digital art practice across hundreds of pavilions and embassies worldwide.
  • Beyond New Media Art: Domenico Quaranta’s writing and reading lists on contemporary digital and post-internet art.

 

AI as Creative Collaborator

The category that did not exist five years ago. Treat these as collaborators, not as oracles. Document what you keep and what you discard.

  • Claude (Anthropic): conversational AI for writing, ideation, research, code, prompt refinement, and structured-data generation. Free tier available.
  • ChatGPT (OpenAI): the other major conversational AI. Includes image generation. Free tier available.
  • Gemini (Google): Google’s conversational AI, free tier available.
  • Hugging Face Spaces: enormous open library of free, hosted AI demos. The single best place to experiment with generative tools without subscriptions.
  • Midjourney: image generation known for distinctive stylistic quality.
  • Krea: generative image and video tools oriented toward designers.
  • Recraft: AI image generation tuned for design and brand work, with vector output.
  • Runway: AI-driven video generation and editing, one of the leading tools in moving image.
  • Stability AI: maintainers of open-weight Stable Diffusion models, runnable locally or via numerous interfaces.
  • Black Forest Labs: makers of the Flux family of open-weight image models.

 

GIFs, Memes, and Visual Internet History

The animated GIF remains a foundational form for net art and a serious medium in its own right.

  • Giphy: the largest searchable GIF library on the web.
  • GifCities: the Internet Archive’s searchable corpus of animated GIFs from the GeoCities era. Strange, ugly, beautiful, indispensable.
  • History of the GIF: Giphy Arts’ interactive timeline of GIF history, 1987 to 2013.
  • Know Your Meme: research-grade documentation of meme history and origins.
  • Artnet News: ongoing coverage of digital art including memes, social media art, and the wider net-art ecosystem.

 

Audio, Video, and Motion

Free or low-cost tools for time-based work.

  • ffmpeg: the open-source command-line tool that quietly powers a huge percentage of video processing on the internet. Essential for any serious video work.
  • Audacity: free, open-source audio editor.
  • DaVinci Resolve: professional video editing and color grading, with a generous free version.
  • OBS Studio: free, open-source streaming and screen recording.
  • ImageMagick: command-line image processing for batch operations and unusual transformations.

 

Generative Art and Creative Code

Code as artistic medium.

  • Processing: the original creative coding environment by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, still maintained and still excellent.
  • p5.js: Processing for the browser, by Lauren McCarthy and contributors. The most accessible starting point for creative code on the web.
  • OpenProcessing: shared sketches, classroom tools, and a community around p5.js and Processing.
  • three.js: JavaScript library for 3D graphics in the browser.
  • Blender: free, open-source 3D modeling, animation, and rendering. Industry-grade.
  • TouchDesigner: node-based visual programming for interactive installations and real-time graphics. Free non-commercial license.

 

Image Editing and Design Tools

What you actually use day to day.

  • Affinity by Canva: the three Affinity apps combined into one free desktop application as of October 2025. Professional vector, raster, and layout in a single tool.
  • Photopea: Photoshop in a browser tab, free, opens PSD, AI, XD, Sketch, and Figma files.
  • Figma: the dominant interface and web design tool, with a generous free tier.
  • GIMP: long-standing free, open-source raster editor.
  • Inkscape: free, open-source vector editor.
  • Krita: free, open-source digital painting application.
  • Canva: fast, browser-based design for social and marketing graphics.

 

Web Publishing, Domains, and Owning Your URL

The infrastructure of publishing your own work on your own terms.

  • CUNY Academic Commons: free WordPress-based platform for all CUNY faculty and students.
  • WordPress.org: the open-source publishing platform, self-hosted.
  • WordPress.com: hosted WordPress with various plans including free.
  • Reclaim Hosting: independent hosting for educators and creators, now also the hosting partner for the CUNY Academic Commons.
  • Ghost: open-source publishing platform focused on writers.
  • Tumblr: still alive, owned by Automattic, still customizable.
  • Are.na: a visual research and collaboration platform, the most thoughtful alternative to Pinterest.

 

On-Chain Provenance and the Decentralized Web

The infrastructure for making work that carries verifiable authorship, ownership, and licensing without depending on any single platform.

  • Base: a low-cost Ethereum Layer 2 network, used widely for affordable on-chain provenance and small transactions.
  • Polygon: another widely-used low-cost network.
  • IPFS: decentralized file storage and content addressing, the standard storage layer for most on-chain art.
  • OpenSea: the largest NFT marketplace.
  • Manifold: tools for artists to deploy their own smart contracts and own their work at the protocol level.
  • Coinbase Wallet: a self-custody wallet for getting started with on-chain work.
  • x402: an emerging protocol for HTTP-based machine payments using stablecoins. The infrastructure for agent-to-agent commerce.

 

Museum APIs and Open Collections

Public-domain primary sources for remixing, study, and reference.

 

Spatial Computing, AR, and 3D

The expanding territory of design and art that lives off the flat screen.

  • model-viewer: Google’s free web component for displaying GLB and USDZ 3D models with AR support, the lowest-friction path to AR on the web.
  • A-Frame: open-source web framework for building VR and AR experiences in the browser.
  • WebXR: the open web standard for VR and AR experiences across devices.
  • Niantic Studio (formerly 8th Wall): browser-based WebAR development platform.
  • Snap Lens Studio: Snapchat’s AR creation tool.
  • Apple Reality Composer Pro: Apple’s spatial computing development tools.
  • OnCyber: free VR gallery creator for displaying digital art in 3D space.
  • Spatial: VR and AR meeting spaces, increasingly used for digital exhibitions.
  • Sketchfab: a large platform for hosting, sharing, and embedding 3D models on the web.

 

Terminal, CLI, and Python for Art

The command line as creative surface. See Project #15 in the syllabus for context.

  • Python: the most versatile language for art, automation, and creative computation.
  • Pillow: the Python imaging library, for generating and manipulating images in code.
  • NumPy: numerical computing in Python, foundational for image and signal processing.
  • Claude Code: an agentic command-line tool that lets you describe a transformation in plain language and watch a script materialize and run.
  • ffmpeg: command-line video and audio manipulation.
  • ImageMagick: command-line image processing.

 

Visual Research and Collaboration

Where you keep your references, your inspirations, and your conversations with other practitioners.

  • Are.na: the thoughtful visual research and collaboration platform that most working artists and designers I respect are using right now.
  • Mastodon: the federated social network where much of the serious digital art conversation has migrated.
  • Bluesky: the alternative to X with growing art and design communities.
  • IndieWeb: the community around owning your own URL and resisting platform lock-in.

 

Archives and Public Domain

The deep well of source material that lives outside copyright and platform control.

 

Open Education Resources

Course materials that anyone can teach from or learn from.

  • DS106 Digital Storytelling: the long-running open course in digital storytelling that still informs the methodology here.
  • DS106 Daily Create: a new short creative challenge every day.
  • DS106 Assignment Bank: a community-built library of design, audio, video, visual, web, and writing assignments.
  • Digital Foundations by Xtine Burrough and Michael Mandiberg: open educational resource teaching visual design principles through Bauhaus-inspired exercises.
  • Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals: open textbook on elements and principles, color theory, typography, and layout.
  • OER Commons: the broad open educational resources commons across disciplines.
  • AIGA: the professional association for design, ongoing source for writing on practice and history.

 

Web Standards and Agent-Readable Web

The technical scaffolding for making work that humans and machines can both read.

  • Schema.org: the shared vocabulary for structured data on the web.
  • llms.txt: an emerging convention for telling AI systems what is on your site and how to engage with it.
  • W3C: the World Wide Web Consortium, maintainer of the standards that make the open web possible.
  • Creative Commons: the licensing framework that makes most of the resources on this page legal to reuse.

 

Books worth owning

Texts that have held up across the changes.

  • The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology, edited by Michael Connor, Aria Dean, and Dragan Espenschied.
  • Net Art Anthology (the online exhibition itself, linked above, is the digital companion).
  • New Media in Art by Michael Rush.
  • Internet Art by Rachel Greene.
  • The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich.
  • Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips.
  • How To by Michael Bierut.

 

Three URLs to anchor everything else

 

(a retired list below, kept here for posterity and legacy by popular demand)

 

Updated – 5/6/25 –

 

 

(Previous list established 11/4/2017 – legacy list)

1. Rhizome – Net Art Anthology Exhibition – https://anthology.rhizome.org/

2. (removed)

3. Popular Mechanics – Long Live the GIF – http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the-gif-is-dead-long-live-the-gif/

4. The New World of Net Art, 2013 for Art News – http://www.artnews.com/2013/06/12/the-new-world-of-net-art/

5. The History of the GIF – via Giphy – https://historyofthegif.com/#/timeline/0

6. Tech-Crunch – 30 Years of the GIF – https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/27/30-years-of-the-gif/

7. Net-Art.org – Website – https://www.net-art.org/

8. ArtNet – 7 Masterpieces of Social Media Art – https://news.artnet.com/art-world/best-social-media-art-1182398

9. Are Memes the Pop Culture Art of our Era? Kate Knibbs – https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/when-does-a-meme-become-art/

10. Can Memes be Art? Huff Post – https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/are-internet-memes-a-form_n_1432076.html

11. UBU WEB – Film & Video Art Archive -(Explore and Explore some more!)  http://www.ubu.com/film

 

Books:

1. New Media in Art (World of Art) Michael Rush, Thames & Hudson,1999.

2. Internet Art (World of Art) Rachel Greene, Thames & Hudson,1999.

 

 

The Transcendent Energy of Play in the Classroom

The Transcendent Energy of Play in the Classroom

This post coincides with my guest talk on Monday 5/3/21 with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy course.

Welcome!

Many thanks to Luke & Lisa, and the ITP students for having me!

I thought that writing a blog post here would be both timely and fun for this talk. It might be full of typos, those happen, haha, they can always be fixed 🙂 This post serves as an example and a potential to create and expand the overall synopsis, dialog, resources, feelings, philosophies and of course necessary contextual links! I hope through our interaction both here and during our talk that it will inspire you to create a playful, collaborative project for yourself, for this class that you are in, for the ones that you are teaching, and also with me here on the Net Art site! This is an inclusive, accessible and safe public space for all.

After our talk, be sure to scroll down to the “Reflections & further Pondering” part at the bottom of this post to share your thoughts. No pressure of course 🙂

 

Words like “playfulness, play and fun” are and have always been an essential parts of my teaching and learning practice. I directly extract the physical energy and emotions that these words activate with in me. I visually connect those feelings to bright sunshine. I connect playfulness to an overall lighthearted and open demeanor that can be applied to almost anything. It’s reflective to childhood and the wonders of learning, creativity and intuition. Playfulness is such a great form of expression as a medium. It sets an open invitation to access rapport. We can help each other learn this way, it is a passion of mine and Im not going to stop anytime soon 🙂

 

"communication" fingerspelled in American sign language

(Above – “Communication” – finger-spelled hand-shapes in American Sign Language)

Everything comes down to Communication. We all want to be loved, appreciated, heard, understood and included. I believe that this is our greatest life’s work, to learn how to best and fully communicate from the inner knowingness of who we are. Of course this is a journey through our constant growth of challenging our life experiences and how we reflect on them. Communication is our birthright and we all must tell our own story.

 

And then.. the Internet shows up..

 

Links for Context and Usefulness

(Feel free to use, remix, hack and expand upon anything here)

 

The Story / About the Net-Art website, Creativity & Experimental Pedagogy

NET-ART’s Rolling OPEN-CALL for Submissions

 

Graphic Design Workshop at the GC 2019

Rebirth of the Course Syllabus, The Visual Aesthetic – Part 1

How to Write your MFA thesis in Fine Art & Beyond – Commons Paper

Why Should I make a Portfolio?

The Net Art Course Lightning Talk

 

Cross CUNY Campus Zine Collab with the NYPL

Cross CUNY, Galluadet & Touro Zine Collab

Collabs with MBS

 

Check out this semesters undergrad course website flow:

CT101 – Digital storytelling – (commons)

MMA 100 Foundation of Graphic Design – (openlab)

 

Animated gif of a landscape passing through the interior space..

For more Ryan Seslow on the web – ryanseslow.com

I make a lot of GIFs, Check out my work on Giphy here

Communicating my Deaf & Hard of Hearing Self – The Online Exhibition

@ryanseslow – on twitter & instagram

 

Reflections & further Pondering:

In the comments section below, please leave your general reflections on this talk and the content presented.

What stands out?

What are the main take aways from this experience that you can implement and take action on right away?

What things do you struggle with as a student, educator and contributor to the world of education? 

Feel free to share links, and other relatedness.

 

Thank You so much!

 

 

 

 

An Agent of Accountability – A Digital Storytelling Prompt

An Agent of Accountability – A Digital Storytelling Prompt

*Assignment prompt – Create and apply digital imagery to exercise, express and extend a metaphor 

(this post is my example)

 

<begin-transmission>

An agent has manifested from with-in you. You are fully responsible for creating and bringing the agent forward. You might not understand what that means just yet, but you will. The agent is made out pixels and rasters. Each pixel is recordable and programable. They each hold a unique series of your emotions, behaviors, interactions and potentials. The agent lives completely on screen and is co-dependent on your device usage and screen time. You thought that you could hide behind the screen, potentially conceal your identity, remain anonymous, and a mystery… but the agent knows otherwise. The agent is here for accountability.

The journey begins from here.. please scroll down.

This image above was seemingly the first recorded visual iteration of the Agent. It’s meta data has been corrupted and continues to be untraceable.. there is also evidence of the original file reconfiguring itself by single characters just to jam the reading/extraction or processing of the information for testing.

A visualization was created above to show “how” the agent entered the Internet grid. The simulation suggests that it was through an open port glitch. This is a vast statement as the range of “open ports” are extremely infinite as uploads and software updates take place around the clock, server to server, port to port. There is an unproven theory that agents can and do enter the grid from simple plug-in updates via the open-source platform, WordPress..

The image above is the most current image that continues to manifest in multiple places. Although there continue to be iterations, much like the two images below that were discovered in late April, 2021. The origin of the iterations are still speculative and only educated guess’s continue to surface with little to no real science based data as to why. What do the iterations represent? Why are they needed? Are they metaphors for pressing / avoided inner demons and issues? Are they there to continue to remind us that we are in a loop? We will continue to follow the process and keep you updated..

<transmission- snip>

The Trickery of a Memories Memory

a digital image of a sculpture of a hard drive

(Read the description here first as it is the assignment’s example)

The Trickery of a Memories Memory..

“The Elusive Memory of Memories from a project about how we think we process Memory” 2020, Digital Ink Jet Print.

(adhered to a brick wall with a temporary adhesive , 1/1 edition)

Context – the digital ink jet print is a photograph of a sculpture. Sculpture origins display the human need to “attempt to make things last forever”, however, this sculpture has melted. Its a reminder. As a Deaf person, I constantly think that I remember the way that certain things used to sound. There is stored memory of those memories. Its a series of fragments and what I choose to tell myself. The image was printed – which is another metaphor of a reproduction to access the past. The past was “cut to its contour” taken from its original digital photograph of the outdated hard-drive mold that was cast in red colorize water. The color red was used to imply visual heat and the passion of emotion, but the nature of temperature applies its earthly laws.. The water was frozen and a cast positive replica was released and composed onto a table. (As I “recall” the capturing process) The cast object was photographed and taken as a metaphor to preserve the ephemerality and the array of lifetime stories that we tell ourselves.

We can always rewrite the story… right?

This is the original digital photograph of the actual cast / frozen mold of the hard drive, can you tell the difference? This cast weighs 2 pounds – the digital one above is as light as a feather..

 

Assignment:

Title: The Digital Displacement of an Object displayed as a Metaphor

In this assignment you will need:

Access to a printer and the ability to print an image. An image that you would like to work with (think a digital photo that you will take with your phone) and the ability to crop, trim and manipulate the image once it has been printed. A scissor or an        x-acto knife will help. Oh, and some form of temporary adhesive like tape will come in handy!

Concept: Connect an object with a metaphor and then place or displace the object “someplace” to display its context. Take a photo of the “piece” as a whole and create a blog post about it. (Yes, you can take take more than 1 image or work with video). Please take a photo of the object before and after / process of the final result. (see my example above).

Inspirational links for more insight: Examples –

Public Intervention

Subway Intervention

Hallway Intervention

Considerations: Connect to a object. Most objects and things that we use each and everyday have intentional and specific purposes. Think about recyclable containers. For example, a water bottle. We usually don’t think much about it, we drink the water and then dispose of the empty water bottle. We rarely think that the bootle has a specific form, it was designed on purpose to be held by our hands. What happens if we strip the empty bottle of its logos and labels and paint the object one solid color? The context changes, we “see” the objects for its shape and form. If we extend this to a metaphor, an object like an empty water bottle asserts itself as a vessel. A container that can hold volume and fluids. Those fluids can be effected by temperature.. get it? Have fun!

(yes, you can always complete this assignment purely digitally if you do not have access to a printer, but seek applied art & design alternatives first – think drawing or collage)

Publishing: After you have crafted your art work and photographed all of the elements, generate a compelling blog post about the process and the meaning of the art. Your approach may be in a narrative “how-to” format much like this assignment description (haha). Or, perhaps your approach is fictional in the form of a short story. 

 

*A gallery of completed artwork will be gathered from all students and participants and later exhibited here on this website.

 

Reach out with questions here: [email protected]

Making a Portfolio/Project Website on the Commons

Im excited to share this blog post with you today (and beyond as it will be updated and archived). As you all know, I’m a big fan of the CUNY Academic Commons. There are more reasons than I can mention at the moment, but I wanted to take this opportunity to emphasize the idea of how essential and easy it is to create a portfolio on the platform. I know, the word “portfolio” itself has several internal triggers. We almost always associate it with “work” or a “job” and it is time to purge, bypass and rethink this. That part is OUR responsibility. Lets not forget the word “FUN” as a part of this process because it can be the driving force behind actually creating something that you are both proud of and eager to put out into the world- (our community here and beyond).

The URL for my example portfolio on the commons is here – https://profryanseslow.commons.gc.cuny.edu

The portfolio site is designed as a visual tutorial that gives both suggestions and instructions, it will help you get started. Think of your visit to the site as inspiration on what some of the potentials can be. It is intended to be the fuel that sparks your ideas into action. I’m also here to help, so feel free to reach out. The example website can be applied to a professional faculty portfolio, a collaborative group project, a specific event or accomplishment. This can also easily be the template for your students, and student work, including helping students create their own variations. 

More to come! 

 

RE-Cap – The NET-ART Open Call Results

With excitement I would like to share the Fall 2018 Open Call for Submissions results that have been received and published here on the Net-Art website. Please take the time to review each project and gallery one at a time. Would you like to assimilate and work on a similar project in your course? Feel free to get in touch.

FALL 2018 Responses to the Open Submissions are now Active Below!

(select each project by title)

Animated GIFs

DIGITAL ART & Static Suchness

Emojied Movie Moments by MBS

Vapor Wave

“WE” ART550 LIU MFA/MA

YORK CT101 – GIF the Portrait

YORK Panorama

 

The OPEN-CALL for Submissions continues this semester!

SPRING 2019

 

What does this mean? What is NET-ART on the Commons?

The NET-ART 2019 academic calendar is now accepting submissions on a rolling proposal basis in the following criteria:

  1. Electronic Media / Experimental Pedagogy
  2. Animated GIFS
  3. Digital Art
  4. VIDEO ART / Experimental Film
  5. NET-ART (Works created and displayed in a web browser)
  6. Class / Course Collaboration
  7. Digital ZINEs
  8. Curatorial (A Curated Group Exhibition)
  9. Solo Exhibition
  10. Net-Art Open Projects – (details here)

Looking for useful tools, apps & tutorials to get your submission started? CLICK HERE!

The NET-ART Submission Guidelines:

Submissions may be generated by CUNY faculty, students of all levels, alumni & community members. CUNY classes/courses may also submit collaborative proposals as a group .

All submitted works will be featured and published as individual blog posts as well as added to existing galleries on the NET-ART website.

Depending on the submission’s proposal, relevant and in context, various submissions will be published and exhibited as an individual page created specifically for the project.

All submissions should be described in written detail with a clear vision, context and meaning. Supporting images and links should be provided as well.

Authors of the submissions and their collaborators must be willing to participate, respond to comments and expand upon their projects with incoming queries via the commons, twitter and beyond.

The purpose of exhibiting submissions in various categories displays a platform for creative and experimental methods of pedagogy. Please consider how your work will contribute to a larger whole that will be archived for teaching, reference and posterity.

 

Question, Proposals & Submissions can be sent via e-mail or via Twitter to:

[email protected]  /  @ryanseslow