Kristina Iankova

@kristinaiid

This blog is a digital sketchbook of sorts documenting my journey on the Information and Interface design course at LCC.

174 posts

Documentation

To document the project I rearranged my housemates room into a home studio, using bedside lights for extra lighting as well as natural light where possible. I was lucky he had such a large room with white wall to create an ‘exhibiton’ environment and the chest of draws I used as a podium we had built from flatpack IKEA a few days before, so by coincidence it worked out perfectly. I didn’t have a tripod either and ended up borrowing one from my elderly neighbour who had last used it in the 80′s!

I used my other housemate Lena as a model as I thought it was important to to show how a viewer would interact with the installation.

I’m pretty proud of the results as photography is not one of my strengths, but I took my time to get this right and I think it’s probably the best I could get under the circumstances.

I also turned some of the footage into gifs which work quite well in showcasing the animation without someone having to dedicate time to watching the video. (gif size too large to post here)

How to present it online?

I created a quick website for the hand in: https://journeytothecenteroftheinternet.netlify.app/

but this wouldn’t be good enough for the virtual degree show. There are a few options I am considering.

Option 1 would be to refine the current minimalist website.

Option 2 would have the same content but the design of the site would be more colourful and in line with the design of the leaflet and illustration but ultimately remain as documentation of the existing project.

Option 3 would see me create an interactive version of the illustration on the screen, and the content of the leaflet would be integrated into the website. Perhaps there could be 2 ‘tabs’ one showing the physical installation and another the interactive version.

How would the experience work?

When everything started to come together I started thinking more about theoretically how the experience would work. In the end I decided to not have a in person visitant and that I would just leave out the maps, glasses (attached to wall w/string) and that people could discover the work for themselves. I think that the blank screen with emanating sound surrounded by glasses would give enough of a hint to put them on. Then before or after looking at the illustration the maps would be there to provide context.

It was a this point I had the idea to make “tickets” which mainly act as dressing to further the point of “a journey” but could also act a business card, that would directly remind the viewer of which project it was linked to.

I also changed the name of the project from “Trip to Cyberspace” to “Journey to the centre of the Internet” as this gives a much clearer idea of what to expect and what the project is about.

The Metaphor Map

Form

The map originally started out as a leaflet/booklet but after having some feedback I decided to transform it into large fold out map, one that may be reminiscent of a free city map or theme park guide. This may be a little difficult to hold and navigate but I think that adds to the ‘travel’ metaphor that I am exploring.

To get a feel of the size I created a blank version:

Style

Initial cover, Refined Cover.

I wanted the visual style of the map to reflect that of the illustration and for there to be a synergy between them. To do this I picked a clean bold font with lots of weights to achieve a clean look, but then used the same bold saturated gradient of colours on the text and as a border.

Using the packed column layout helped to achieve the city map look, as they are usually trying to cram in as much info (and ads) as possible. This was also true for me as my writing ended up being around 3000 words, so I had to use a condensed font to make it fit. To break it up a bit I varied the width of the images. I made sure that the column gaps would line up with the folds in the paper to ensure readability.

In contrast to the super packed text on the right, I designed the back of the folded leaflet (bottom right corner) , which is also the visible and the right way up when you are reading to be a super concise description of the project so that people know what it’s about before they start reading, and if it’s the only thing they read it give them an idea of what’s going on.

On the reverse I created a line art version of the illustration adding a border, key and grid system that would give further visual cues that it is a map.

What does it say?

The actual copy in the leaflet is somewhat of a short essay, covering the origin of each metaphor, it’s effects and it’s downsides as well as exploring a few theories on why we use so many metaphors and why spacial ones are particularly prevalent.

Originally I wanted the writing style to match the map, pretending that these were real places that you could tour. However I am not a wordsmith and this proved too difficult so I ended up writing it in an informal academic style with a bibliography at the end. Whilst this isn’t as good I think the visual style carries a lot of the ‘map’ cues so the academic writing doesn’t detract too much.

Printing.

Printing the map is an unfinished nightmare. When I was designing it I had no idea how difficult it would be to find somewhere that could print A1 double sided. I called up 6-7 print places but they all said their large format printers couldn’t do it. I eventually found some companies online that do double sided wall calendars who could potentially do it, but their minimum orders where quite large and wouldn’t arrive on time.

In the end I really need to take the pictures so I actually just got them printed single sided and then used clever angles to make it look like one sheet in the photographs.

Obviously, if I was to exhibit this physically I would have to sort this out.

Physical Components

Due to corona it was a little bit harder to sort out the physical components.

I managed to source the TV on Gumtree and walked 2 hours to pick it up, the glasses I ordered online, and the polarising film took ages to come from China so I ended up having to order more from the UK at 4 times the price but it all worked out in the end.

To removed the polarising film from the TV screen I first had to take of the main film using a razor blade and credit card to detach it. This resulted in my hands getting lots of small nicks and cuts.There was a strong adhesive glue between this layer and the one below that the tutorials did not mention. Once the main film was removed I had to purchase surgical spirit which would help to disolve the glue residue and go over the whole screen with the razor again to scrape it all off. It was tedious but kind of satisfying in a instagram-asmr video way.

To make the glasses I popped the lenses out of the frames I bought and cut the polarising film to size, it was finicky and not perfect as the new lenses would occasionally pop out but since it was all just for photographs (for now) I decided not to worry about it too much. In an actual exhibition context I would need to make them sturdier.

Animation

I had quite a bit of previous experience with animation so it wasn’t too difficult to animate the components in the illustration as they were mainly variations on transforming the rotation, position, opacity or scale property of an object.

I did learn a few new techniques though, for example how to create a perfect loop (by matching the last frame to the first frame) and also using code (expressions) to infinitely loop animations. The hardest part was trying to obscure where the animation loops (at 14 seconds) in order to make it seem continuous. There are certain small giveaways but overall I think I managed to make it pretty seamless.

Sound

For the sound design I spent a while searching for royalty free sound effects and ended up combining ‘city park’ with ‘data stream’ and ‘Eerie Rumble Room Tone, With Tonal Computer Data Processing Noise’ to give the animation some atmosphere.

Developing the Illustration

After drawing the initial outline of the illustration I was a bit stuck on how to continue as I didn’t have a specific illustration style that I was trying to follow. I knew I wanted it to be a least semi-realistic and give a sense of an actual place so but also have a slight ‘retro’ feel as a lot of the metaphors I was going to discuss where actually from the late 90′s/early 2000′s. I watched a few airbrush style tutorials and consulted a book of 90′s movie posters I had lying around before just getting stuck in and sort of figuring it out as I went along.

Light and shadow play a very important part in the making an illustration look good and realistic so I established the position of the sun early on and then used that as guide for shading the rest.

Over a couple of weeks I managed to illustrate the buildings, backgrounds and atmospheric items. It was then time to start adding small details such as people and cars who are essential to making the illustration look busy.

At first I carried on drawing everything from scratch but as time became tighter I ended up downloading some stock vectors of people and cars that I could modify to fit my own style.

People

My first thought for the people was to have this semi realistic/ semi futuristic floating person style that could be easily edited and animated. After playing around with this style though I decided to go for something more realistic.

To speed things up I downloaded some stock illustration (figures on white background) and then used their proportions, arms and legs to create my own characters such as the police officers. I was careful to make sure that my characters where diverse in race/sex/religion etc as part of ‘global village’ is that the internet includes everybody.

After a while, it was becoming quite tedious to keep creating more and more people so I ended up filling the crowd with some more generic stock people that has a similar style and only required mild adjustment. (image below)

I did also attempt to draw my own cars, however time was really getting on at this point so I also used manipulated stock imagery for them.

Project overview so far

The illustration so far:

This is the project overview I put together for our first online class after Easter. It was useful to organize my thoughts like this and make a plan of what I needed to achieve.

Describe some bits of illustration.

Developing the Composition + Style Experiments

I decided to go with the screen based idea in the end as the psychical data centre reconstruction would be near impossible under lockdown. Except for I decided to combine all the metaphors into one image rather than having 5 separate screens. I was looking at works by Hieronymus Bosch and surrealism for composition inspiration.

These were my intial sketches. I was going with this long format as it felt naturally suited to the work.

I want the piece to have a a chaotic, busy, busting enerygy with lots of movement, which represents to high speed and chaotic nature of the Internet. This will be achieved through the addition of lots of people doing various activities and animating elements such as the clouds. I liked the idea of having elements of symmetry similar to some religious paintings imagery which imagines imaginary places such as Heaven and Hell. I want to have lots of small hidden details and things for people to slowly explore the image whislt wearing the glasses – in this way it “reveals” itself to them.

After decided on the rough placement of everything I started to think about how I would realise this vision. I tried a bit of collage as this would give it the most realistic look and would be the easiest for me to make and animate.

The above image was a quick experiment with collage however I wasn’t super happy with how it was going so I decided I would illustrate the whole thing instead.

I started drawing the line art in illustrator before I started to question the viability of long drawing. I was using the aspect ratio (21:9) of ultrawide monitors as a guide not realising that it would very difficult and expensive for me to source one that I could then strip the polarising film from. After a bit of research I decided to go with the much more popular widescreen ratio of (16:9) as I found plenty of old cheap TV’s with this for around £30-50.

I then worked on building up the illustration. I had previously been stuck for ideas but as I worked on the easier elements I gained inspiration for the small details I would include later. So far I am focusing on the static elements, later I will decide what the people in this will look like as the majority of the animation will fall on them.

What does the Internet look like?

oI was struggling a bit to get more concrete ideas for each section so I did a bit more research. This time focusing purely on the visual, animation based media. These are 3 examples of the kind of media I looked at. Most of them rely heavily on the information highway metaphor I guess because its easiest to visualise?

Warriors of the Net is a 1999 animated short film depicting how packets travel along the information superhighway. It has educational elements in terms of the information given is very detailed in describing firewalls, routers TCP/IP but it also heavily personifies these things, such as the router being portrayed as “uncaring” and packets being slaves to our will.

Information-Stupor Highway is an episode of Fairly Odd Parents that somewhat parodies the concept of the information highway and follows Jimmy trying to retrieve a missent email, visiting others computer, wrecking havoc with data and travelling along the info highway.

http://www.vvvvvv.xxx/private.php

The Cyberpussy manifesto is a piece of abstract feminist net art which claims that if you “ pry open the orifice of the internet with a speculum and you will find the tunnelling walls of a vagina.”, and that the Internet is inherently feminine.

When you explore the “private viewing rooms” you are taken to a selection of looping gifs/videos which are all depictions of cyberspace that focus of the idea of a small black hole like image with things moving into or away from it - which is a symbolic reference to a vagina. It’s an intresting idea to say the least.

Further Development

I still wasn’t sure who I wanted by audience to be so I decided to just collate all the info I wanted to present and worry about how I was going to communicate it later.

The most important thing I guess is to have a rational as to why this project matters.

• It is important to think about metaphors of the Internet not only because they reveal what different actors think it is but also because they tell us something about what they want it to become

• What does each metaphor reveal

• What does it obscure

• As we experience more negative effects of the internet we need to be careful of the metaphors we use

• Distinction between the real/virtual becoming increasingly blurred e.g. internet being used to model cities.

• What it eventually becomes is now emerging from all our collective imaginations and conversations

• What do we want the future internet to become?

With coronavirus taking everything online these questions become even more important.

Audience? what next?

To try and figure out some of the formats/refine the idea I knew I had to think about audience.

I decided to visit the Science and Design Museums before they closed to see the different ways they presented information, look at their interactive exhibits and find inspiration for how my audience could interact with my project and also to check out the Information Age exhibit.

Science Museum

1) Interaction

To be honest I was a little disappointed with their interactive exhibits. A lot of the interactive bits where just simple games or quizzes (some with rather dated graphics) on touch screen and whilst I do understand these are aimed at children I was expecting a little more considering how well renowned the Museum is. I didn’t like the amount unnecessary transitions and animations as I felt they took too long and did not particularly add anything to the experience.

There were some higher spec interactions which were well designed, but there seemed to be a lot of technical issues. Another problem was not being able to try out the ones requiring group interaction (due to Coronavirus the museum was quite empty).

However I did like their practice of asking a big question as a starting point on a topic.

2) Information Age exhibit.

This exhibit was split into 6 sections covering communication technology from the telegraph to the Mobile phone.

It was super interesting to see the history of the physical infrastructure that led us to the internet networks we have today. They even had sections of the first telegram undersea cable and one of the first rack servers used by Google! Whilst the historical sections were quite well done I really thought the web and cell sections were lacking. The exhibition was designed in 2014 so it already felt a little dated when they were talking about the impacts of the web, social media etc.

I think it focused way too much on the physicality (for example displaying lots of hardware) and ignoring the social impacts of these technologies. They did not ask the same big questions that were common in the space section.

Therefore I think there is scope for me to position this Internet Metaphor project as an extension or “update” to the Web section of this exhibition. Where people could explore their ideas of what the web is and then question how these metaphors affect how we see the web and its future.

If I decide to go with the idea to situate my project as a museum piece I want to aim it at a general audience, as with everything at the Science Museum but not specifically at children.

Design Museum

I visited the Design Museum to see a different way of presenting work. Featured in their ‘designers in residence’ section was Robert Johnsons work which looked at Fat as a fuel source or recyclable material. This wall shows samples of fat waste collected from different areas of London. There’s is also a film and a some samples of materials made from fat. However its presentation/curation is much closer to an art exhibit in style - there is less emphasis on clear presentation of information and the audience has to work a bit harder to get to the point - but this does encourage more exploration and discovery.

Further Idea Development

I was struggling to come up with an idea for what a ‘trip to the cloud’ in whatever format could involve as it is not something that is easy to criticise despite there being varying discourse around security, ownership, environmental impact (highlighted in previous post) because it was all quite nuanced so harder to parody.

I mentioned this to Gareth and he commented that maybe just making people consider the ideas around internet metaphors and bringing them to the forefront of peoples attention was enough since this is something so ingrained into everyday life it becomes invisible.

With this in mind I came up with an idea which could be realised in different ways.

Allow people to ‘peep’ into the internet - presenting them with a visual representation of different metaphors that are used to describe the internet over time. This will allow them to think about these ideas and how they have evolved over time -- separately I want to give this work context with information about what each metaphor obscures or reveals (this could be as a poster/book/website).

I had 2 ideas for how this could go.

With both ideas I am keen to keep the object and the context/information seperate as I want people to really experience the object and engage with it - letting their imaginations go and not have to worry about presenting information in that environment. If they are curious they can then read the info on the website/book/whatever.

My first idea was to get set up something that looks like a server rack at a data center where people can ‘peep’ inside the internet and see a representation of one of the following metaphors; The cloud/ Cyperspace/ Global Village/ Information Superhighway/ World wide web.

I think this is a good way to get people thinking as it turns something completely digital and imaginary (eg the cloud) into something physical and tangible. Having ‘peepholes’ allows the interaction to suggest that the user is seeing something they would not normally see.

My idea for how the inside would look is inspired by artist Tracy Snelling, who’s work I saw at the Venice Bienniale last summer. She creates these sculpture/dioramas of city blocks which you can peep inside and see into different flats - with heavy use of lighting and electronics is something I would like to replicate.

These are some cheap server cases I have found available on ebay which I would build my worlds inside of. Dimensions : Height: 8.8cm, Width 48.3cm Depth 28cm

Then separately I would give additional context/info perhaps in the form of a website where the scrolling matches the layout/style of the tower?

The second version of this idea I am not as keep on but would be a lot more doable during covid-19 epidemic. The main reason I don’t want to do this one is because it the representations of each metaphor will be virtual rather than tangible so it is not really making the metaphor “real”.

The plan would be to have a series of 5 screens (one for each metaphor) that act as a portal into each metaphorical world. These screens would be hacked so that unless you are wearing polarising glasses you just see white -- this is to recreate the ‘reveal’ that you are seeing something normally unseen.

Context surrounding each metaphor could be given around each screen.

The content on the screens would be a looping animation that shows each metaphorical world.

In the end I decided to pursue the cloud idea but as my research progressed it spread to internet metaphors in general.

Internet Metaphors are in themselves pataphysical since they are completely imaginary solutions/ideas as to how the inside of the internet looks/ how data travels.

Idea Development

After exploring Pataphysics for a while I started to think about the topics I could apply it to - whilst having a vague Tim Hutchin-esque machine stuck in the back of my mind.

Direction 1

Following the topic of my dissertation.surrounding the Digital Detox I thought that I could do a patypahysical parody of the digital detox - presenting information in an absurd way and highlighting how detoxes can reinforce neolibral ideas of self control. The physical machine might involve someone lying down and watching video or a set of bizzare instructions they have to follow in a booth in order to ‘detox’.

Direction 2

The second idea I had was a machine/experience that allows someone to visit ‘the cloud’ (as in the internet) and play on ideas such as “surfing” the web. Maybe a person could physically surf through internet cables and visit different parts of the internet?

Further Research in the area of Pataphysics (click to enlarge) I am finding making powerpoints quite a good way to organise my thoughts.

‘Pataphysics

Similar to his fellow theorists, Baudrillard sees all the received forms of political critique and action as “outdated weapons” and urges us to discard all “liberal nostalgia” (1993b: 3, 2008: 61) we may still harbor. According to him, only a radically new perspective will be able to fathom and respond to the changed realities. What is needed is a fundamental transformation of theory that would reproduce the transformation of the system and hence yield a theoretical outlook that would be its equal. Baudrillard declares: “Since the world is on a delusional course, we must adopt a delusional standpoint towards the world.” (1993c: 1) Thus, following the enemy, theory, too, “is moving into the hyperspace of simulation […l, a process whereby it loses all ‘objective’ validity but gains substantially in real affinity with the present system” (Baudrillard 1994f: 2f). “If the intellectuals of today seem to have run out of things to say”, Baudrillard maintains, “this is because they have failed to assume this ironic function, confining them- selves within the limits of their moral, political or philosophical consciousness despite the fact that the rules have changed, that all radical criticism now belongs exclusively to the haphazard, the viral, the catastrophic” (1993c: 44). It was Alfred Jarry’s proto-Surrealist anti-philosophy of 'pataphysics’ — “the science of imaginary solutions” (Jarry 1996: 22) — that was to provide Baudrillard with a model for the kind of delusional stance he was calling for. He contends that postmodern reality, exceeding all limits, “corresponds to the pataphysical sphere” and that consequently, “the only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics” (2005: 45, 1993b: 4). Christian Bök has described pataphysics as “a philosophic alternative to rationalism”, evoking and valorizing “cases of exceptional singularity”, and as a radicalization of theory, devoted to “a spirit of permanent rebellion”; it is, he explains, a Nietzschean “'gay science,’ whose joie de vivre thrives wherever the tyranny of truth has increased our esteem for the lie and wherever the tyranny of reason has increased our esteem for the mad” (2002: 3, 5, 9).

J.G. Ballard's Politics: Late Capitalism, Power, and the Pataphysics of Resistance

After talking to Catherine during the Design Research session she introduced me to the idea of ‘Pataphysics. This extract, specifically the bolded parts are why why I think it is super relevant to the world today and would like to use it as a method to apply to whatever this project ends up being.

Machine Research

I began my research by looking at Michael Reeves, a popular Youtuber who builds DIY robots. A lot of them are quite silly (many feature Tazers) to play to his predominantly teenage audience but there are also a few really creative ideas such as ‘A roomba that screams when it hits things’ or another creation which shoots him with a BB gun every time he is shot in Minecraft.

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