Website Workshop 2020-08-09

--- tags: meeting notes --- # Website Workshop 2020-08-09 4-6pm EST via Zoom JOIN CALL: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/96488511351?pwd=Y2hzVElQQW5WSGhYelVNcW03OWJkUT09 **Attending**: Emma, Casey **Facilitator**: Casey **Notetakers**: Emma, Casey See also: [Website Workshop](https://hackmd.io/RcmH1UYlRh6a1rcJYYcyWA) ## Notes - Emma - Multiple venn diagrams - How there are different connections and overlaps, you can arrange circles in different ways, transparencies that unveil a different kind of image - Plants growing - Don't know if it's all plants or some, on the surface they appear are discrete plants but the roots are all connected. Website as a plot of soil meditating between discreteness and interconnectedness. - Boxes and albums in book or thrifstores - Specific, linear way of viewing a collection. What would be a box you could spill and shuffle everything? - A website as a mailbox. Sending and receiving. Get and Put requests. Being mindful and intentional about data transfer. - Torrenting -- seeding and leeching. - Square floorplan - If it was a room, should be comfortable. Multiple entry and exit points. You can see the infrastructure. Sometimes there's scaffolding in certain places but that's OK. You can move furniture around however you like. OK to break things, OK to repair things. - A library where you could not only look but touch. In terms of accessibility but also diversity of interaction. - How someone might walk around. You end where you start? Hyperlink universe. When you click on an article about snails and get to an article about deep ocean or hubble telescope a few clicks away. Verbs that people use to describe internet: Surfing, Zooming, a website as a wave. A swell. A high and low tide. Returning to this idea of how we get information. Algorithms decide how you receive info or how you should be thinking about your desire. I would like to build a website where you trust youself and your own desires. - Libraries. Read an article and saw lecture by her. Article on fugitive libraries, and architecture of libraries. Way it's designed spatially corresponds to ethos. Library as epistomology in and of itself. - ![](https://i.imgur.com/NSaSyGm.jpg) - Casey - Referring to boxes you can spill -- boxes of booklets, you can rearrange the order - Torrenting! You can download everything at once -- massive amount of information, peer to peer, good for ilicit stuff, can't be shut down - ![](https://i.imgur.com/G5gAn7q.png) - internet archive, logo that looks like institution emoji (bought a building that looks like this hehe), archive as an institution - library at oberlin, well designed, as you enter at the bottom: bottom is loudest zone and gets quieter as you - go up (this is actually the same at the library at barnard), a gradient of loudness - christopher alexander (?): intimacy gradients, front room is the most public, back rooms are the most private - archive at cooper: tucked away in a corner, locked room, up a flight of stairs, visit by appointment, uncatalogued boxes. tiny locked room inside of the library...not necessarily what i want but have experienced - box of pamphlets, that hold maps, box of maps at the head of the trail -- a way of distributing things in situ, self served and weatherproof, where do maps get distributed? - a folding table at a school with balloons! stand at a table, there's zines, bungee cord to stop from blowing away - basement doorway, infoshop? a radical space where there's a free copier, space to meet, cool stuff lying around, you might not have come across otherwise! - Emma - Box of maps, someone who is about to go on a trail. These are trails you might like to take. It's your choice. - What is a website that is weatherproof? Solar website, solar magazine website. Really mindful about energy consumption. Really typing abstract system of data and bits and pixels and information and making it very tied to material things. Raw materials that get converted to energy. - Casey - Think of things you wouldn't have already thought of -- what would it feel like if the core function of the website was to shake the box? or if it had something more to do with a trail map vs. a map of literal universities - you can move things around however you like, you can break/repair things -- this might be an interesting thing to think about, what kind of room have we currently built? it's rigid, a grid, you can't add to it, you can take as much as you want, but you can't really rearrange, shuffle, kind of suggests a nested set of boxes. you can open a box within a box which has stuff, but you can't rearrange anything, a static grid. what would a space for repair look like? - Emma - Speculative questions, hard to translate -- but important and fun. One example I really like, maybe a trend. Things you can click and drag. Really like when I can break a website by accident. Would love to see front page shake. All the tiny disos tumble around. Says something about ethos. - Casey - Everyone can drag things around, but everyone's dragging on the same canvas - https://www.art.yale.edu/ -- anyone can edit the background at any time -- this is the worst website on the internet!! "too democratic", too much control over an institutional website - people could move things around, but its not only for you - https://www.sitterwerk.ch/ https://www.sitterwerk.ch/En/Dynamische-Ordnung -- a library where the books don't have any specific order, each have an rfid chip, every day a scanner moves across the wall and updates the catalogue, books don't need an order, you can track how people move the books around, people can arrange them on tables, library that invites people to bring things into constellation, dynamic order - there's something wrong about one hierarchy and static boxes...overlapping venn diagrams is more appropriate, overlapping colors/transparencies that create different kinds of colors or images - Emma - From Shannon: way you catalog is determined by a knwoledge system, reflects kinds of power. Workshop on kinds of libraries. Libraries and cataloging and spatial order of things is tied to mental order of information, how knowledge is circulated in certain ways to serve specific interests. A library you can curate for yourself but someone can curate differently. Rearrange same items. - Casey - when you photocopy things, you can chop and screw things together, assemble that into your own kind of book. component parts not heavily bound, you don't have to cut the binding on a zine, easy and inherently photocopied - Emma - [Kameelah Janan Rasheed] (https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/kameelah-janan-rasheed-on-research-and-archiving/) -- at New Museum, bunch of zines with a big xerox so anyone can photocopy what they want, take pages, rearrange, create new collections. Specifically about black radical tradition, people distributing pamplets in underground ways. - Mailbox, adding/taking, sending/receiving. Right now it's really mediated by us. Maybe in future doesn't have to be. Seems to me that each of these objects has an address, specific locale. Mailboxes across an area, a network where you can send and receive. - Casey - Another thing that came to mind: a directory, just a way to see who is where and how to reach them, a physical directory is a good analog in some way - A directory could almost be as valuable as having the materials...a way to communicate -- you can leave a note in the mailbox, you can leave a note in a place for the people in the place, how to interact - Emma - Issuu probably has comments but very different from what we're thinking. - Casey - Every website is a rectangle/text boxes, but if you don't think about the nature of the interaction you can put whatever in there (spam, selling stuff)...if you think about it in terms of a mailbox...groups/readers sending mail, readers sending mail to authors, different from what you would do in the comment box (eg: "first!"). the way we can think about it more intentionally, this is a comfortable space, a safe space or moderated space...on issuu you can probably comment whatever you want but here it might have to go through someone - A switchboard, someone that can connect you to someone else on this grid, a website as a switch board between inanimate object (this zine wants to talk to that zine) - Emma - Could short circuit something but that's okay. - Casey - Really useful to think about rough edges, unfinishedness, breaking as part of the architecture, it can be shitty because the point isn't that it's expensive or pristine, not where the emphasis is on. - Another idea: not so much about a physical place, but about the table in front of the school, the website is a chrome extension so that every time you're visiting an edu site, it can show you the diso /insert them into the page. where do these things live? they're meant to be in situ. have a setting where once we have those venn diagrams, we can see these are the ones that are disorienting this institution + the ones venn diagramming with it...the website becomes a way to navigate everything cool. - Parasite onto the institution website, loading in the background, but this is the content on top, a screenshot of the website, you can opt in. it could also be fun to have a version...a version of google where you can explode the elements of the website. click on any element and just break it! popping bubble wrap to break the institutional website - Emma - Offshoot thought: a lot of institutions have admin permissions, installing chrome extension on every computer in the library. Another way of distributing, not just physical and digital but as a website. - Casey - Laurel made this extension -- a piece of javascript, a cheesy 90s snow/rain effect for the weather where she is! - Disos are seasonal, they have a specific annual rythm (i don't know how to spell), released in september... - Used to live near a place where it was an ice cream shop/tax office in the summer/winter, like the idea that there's a seasonal element, different in september and different in the winter than it is in the summer - Emma - Had a lot of ideas about space but not about time. One example from Laurel: website as a puddle. Does our collection have a temporal dimension? Wouldn't want these things to fade away over time. Thinking a lot about lineage of publication. How time could be playing into website. - Casey - Visually placing them in a timeline, if you could look at them all...right now the homepage is random... look at them by year instead! Interesting to look at covers by year, aesthetics change over time, at one point they get computery - Try to archive every yearbook at cooper (scanning the visuals)...yearbook aesthetics over the years are funny and weird!! What was the theme of this yearbook (eg: in 1999 it was matrix, or true crime, noir). bizarre but also of the time when you look at it! - The way that Joanna Drucker catalogues things -- aesthetic - http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/exhibits/exhibit3.html - http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/dark.xml - agents: an agent could be a person, a group, or a institution, can have different roles in the project, information about the publication itself - aesthetic profiles: themes, community, forms -- the community in the aesthetic profile of the thing - production narrative, critical analysis, etc. - How many disos are produced in print? At cooper there might be around 1000, interesting to know how many were made, just interesting context. - the work is the main thing, within that there are editions, then the object, and then theres images. - Emma - What kinds of self-reflection do diso groups do? Related more to broader goals of group, thinking of when you were mentioning oral history or memory work -- want to know more about what people think about when they make a diso, when it's released, when it's received. How do decisions get made. What happens when it's out there -- nothing til next september. What if every group had their own "critical analysis" section. Groups reflecting on their strategy and tactics. - Casey - Might be complicated to implement, there's this group in Spain called guerilla media collective, diso manifesto, a radical method of collaboration and cooperation. Proposing radical blockchain governance, sketchy but provocative. totally speculative system of governance, try to operate as if it's real even though it's not - There are probably ways to implement these things without technology, without limitation or in spite of whatever limitations of time or technology...would love to think about what's the most exciting intervention, and how we do it in a way that's attainable. nothing's standing in the way! - A weird thing about composers -- someone was talking to phillip glass, "it must feel so amazing you can make whatever you want because you're famous, any resources"..."i've always worked at the scale that i've had the resourcse to work, never sought to do anything bigger thatn what I'm able to do at the moment." - Never getting to create this grand work. Having access to very few resources is fine, you can work at any scale - Another dimension (space/time) is scale, for us to operate at a kind of appropriate scale will be really liberating, we don't need a contractor, architect, land ownership, to build a space. grab any materials and figure out how to put it together ourselves and with friends ## check-in on other stuff - Generative spaces/coworking time - Check-ins - Who are they for? - Need: to update others - Could be a written update - What would be interesting or useful for you? - eg: programming, working on a diso, library, blog - When do you want to meet, what do you want in a meeting, frequency - More that we can make more publicly available would be cool -- what are entry points? - Call for collaborators...but what is this group and what are we currently working on and what are ways you can participate? - Consolidating and editing everything into one web page (what our group is, how to participate, etc.) - Our Networks - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Rnlh6fWwfWpI9FUXcNwkKM1W2BV85COdbcj8m7n7Mu8/edit?usp=sharing - Wanting something more generative than teaching a skill - Did we decide we want a technical component? ## Next steps - [ ] Weekday evening check-in this week, (Emma and Casey flexible this week, check in with Jason, Matt, Katie) - [ ] Coworking session on entrypoints - who would want to be interested in a project like this? - haven't exhausted reaching out to student groups, also thinking about different places people come from, eg: archivists, zine librarians list, etc. less about something we need from student activists - eg: interference archive, others? - ways we distribute labor of the project a bit more intentionally, e.g. facilitation - [ ] Next Sunday, same time period for Our Networks - [ ] Casey reach out to Laurel about 2 sundays from now or whenever she's available - [ ] Casey and Emma Meet on Tuesday 8/11 11am for Project STAND and ask if others can join - [ ] Casey confirm OurNetworks time Friday 9/11 at noon - [ ] Casey to confirm bio with OurNetworks - [ ] Casey start OurNetworks Resource Guide / Bibliography -- links from Zulip - [ ] Emma start Presentation Google Slides -- share a doc