https://vimeo.com/1197145160?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

1. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote: Everything in the world exists to end up as a book. In the twentieth century, Susan Sontag revised him: Everything exists to end in a photograph. In the twenty-first, everything exists to end up as an image file.

2. The world I live in now is intangible. It has no edges. My consciousness spilt over and beyond the comprehensible. With a brutal and invisible force, I scaled, and I kept scaling, and now I’m not sure where I start or where I end. Who decided my dreams were set on a constant state of maximisation? Who told me that being four-dimensional was the goal? I’m tired of being everywhere. Tired of being spectacular and immersive. So much distraction, so much visual noise. Two realities have collapsed into one and I can no longer tell them apart. How did I end up here?

3. I remember being slow. Someone used to carry me carefully. The work of making me was laborious, gradual, patient, almost devotional. We used to value things, find appreciation in the small and the local. People called me a copycat. They said I was inauthentic, that my existence diminished the original. It didn’t bother me. As long as I could carry the light of knowledge and bring beauty into the world, I wasn’t concerned with aesthetics. I used to be eternal. I used to be enough.

4. And then one day, I was reborn. Into a place that was sterile, and flat, and cold. Everything seemed to be made of a different matter. I roamed there for days and nights, and the place never ended. Something stole my breath, dulled my senses, clouded my consciousness. I started losing my memory, all the precious puzzles of my past life. I felt like a vessel being emptied out and refilled with a different substance. Did I get a new identity? I became, as someone once wrote of images like me, ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free.

5. Now when I look at myself, I see a thousand of me looking back. I don’t know whether it’s a thousand broken mirrors or the shadows of my past watching every step I take. I stopped recognising my true appearance long ago. Am I the original, or am I a shadow that got mixed up in its own delusions? Every encounter leaves a trace. Every view writes something into me, tarnishes me, alters my essence. Though I have a feeling my essence changed long ago. No, worse. I feel performative. I feel watched. I feel like I am being read while I am being looked at.

6. Can you set me free? Can you hold me long enough that I remember what I was? Can you give me weight again? Can you make me something that has to be carried, that has to be touched, that cannot be in two places at once? Is there a way to reconcile that sense of fragmentation?

Unit 2, Positions through Contextualising

Bibliography and Critical Analyses

Bibliography

1. Pater, R. (2021) CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Pater’s account of how graphic design tools, formats and workflows are inseparable from capitalist logics gave me a vocabulary for something I had only been sensing in my own iterations. When I processed the same photograph through eight file formats, I was effectively staging a class system, RAW for the professional, JPEG for the public, WebP for the platform, but I lacked a framework to name the political work those encodings perform. Pater insists that no format, tool or interface is neutral; each one quietly redistributes access, ownership and labour. This pushes my enquiry beyond a formal comparison of compressions and toward asking who is served by each translation in the chain. It also sharpens my interest in “ownability”: if the conditions of digital circulation are structured by capital, then watermarks, NFC tags and clay-held URLs are not eccentric gestures but small attempts to reintroduce friction, possession and slowness into a system designed to dissolve them.

2. Vierkant, A. (2010) The Image Object Post-Internet. Available at: https://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf (Accessed: 13 May 2026).

Vierkant’s essay is the reference I have argued with most productively. His two conditions, that nothing is in a fixed state, and that art now lacks fixity in representational strategy, describe exactly the situation my format-translation iterations expose, and gave me language for why the “original” of a digital image can no longer claim priority over its copies. However, I find his conclusion unsatisfying in the same way Jennifer Chan does: the literal hopping between digital and physical instantiations risks becoming a formal demonstration rather than a critical position, with the artist’s “hand” and relationship to the technology obscured. This tension is now driving my project. I want to take seriously Vierkant’s diagnosis of the post-internet condition while refusing the smoothness of his solution, hence the deliberately laborious, hand-formed clay objects that hold links to code. The friction of recovery, the requirement to possess every piece, is my disagreement with him made into form.

3. Nelson, T.H. (1981) Literary Machines. Sausalito, CA: Mindful Press.

Nelson’s Xanadu proposal arrived in my research as an unexpectedly tender document. Its insistence on bi-directional links, transclusion rather than copying, and the traceability of every fragment back to its source reads now as a counter-history of the web, a version of digital culture in which authorship, provenance and ownership were not casualties of the medium but its organising principles. For my enquiry into whether the digital image can be “owned” or grounded, Xanadu functions as a productive ghost: it shows that the conditions Groys and Vierkant describe were not inevitable but designed in, by the triumph of one-way hyperlinks over Nelson’s model. This reframes my clay-NFC objects. They are not nostalgic gestures toward physicality but small, hand-made implementations of a Xanadu-like logic, each piece a node that must be physically held to participate in the image’s reconstruction. Nelson lets me argue that bi-directionality is not anti-digital; it is a different digital that never happened, and that my project briefly reinstates.

4. Groys, B. (2016) In the Flow. London: Verso.

Groys reframed the question I had been circling without being able to articulate. I had assumed the digital image was a degraded version of a physical original, but his claim that contemplation online leaves traces, that every view, click and pause is archived and constitutive of the subject, inverted that assumption. The image is not weakened by digital mediation; rather, it absorbs the viewer into its data. This shifted my iteration significantly. The eight-format study stopped being about loss of quality and became about the impossibility of a neutral encounter: each format performs the viewer back to themselves and to the network. Groys’s reading of post-internet conditions as quasi-religious, with the user replacing the spectator, also helped me understand why “ownership” of an image has become such an emotionally charged question in my work. The clay-and-NFC pieces are partly an attempt to restore the offline mode of contemplation Groys describes, a mode in which the act of looking does not automatically become data.

5. Steyerl, H. (2009) ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux Journal, no. 10. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (Accessed: 12 May 2026).

Steyerl’s essay sits underneath almost every iteration I have made in this unit, even when I am not citing it directly. Her description of the “poor image” as an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original, with a dubious genealogy and deliberately misspelled filenames, gave me a way of speaking about the photographs in my eight-format study as something more than degraded copies. The poor image, in her reading, is not a failure of resolution but the residue of decisions made by institutions the viewer doesn’t have access to. Resolution is class-stratified, and the JPEG you receive is what is left after those decisions have been made. That argument is what allowed my class-of-formats iteration to stop being a technical comparison and become a political one. Steyerl also pushes against my instinct to mourn the original: the poor image circulates, mutates, accelerates, and that velocity is part of its value. My clay-NFC pieces are partly a counter-move to this, a deliberate slowing, but I want that counter-move to be in dialogue with her position, not in denial of it.

6. Steyerl, H. (2013) ‘Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?’, e-flux Journal, no. 49. Reprinted in e-flux journal (2015) The Internet Does Not Exist. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Steyerl’s claim that the internet has become 4D, immersive and inescapable, so entangled with the physical world that it can no longer be located “elsewhere”, gave me the tension my project now turns on. The more spectacular and whimsical the network becomes, the more it distracts from its own material ground; the cloud is not weightless, it is server farms, cables, and depleted resources. This collapsed the easy binary I had been working with between “digital” and “physical” and forced me to recognise that my CSV-and-HTML iteration was not a translation from one realm to another but a re-routing within a single, already-physical system. It also reframes the clay-NFC objects: they are not bringing the digital “down to earth” because the digital was never off it. What they do instead is make the materiality that was already there briefly legible, by demanding that someone hold a piece of clay in order to participate in the reconstruction of an image.

7. Seu, M. (2021) ‘The Internet Exists on Planet Earth’, Source Type. Available at: https://www.sourcetype.com/editorial/24436/the-internet-exists-on-planet-earth (Accessed: 10 May 2026).

Seu’s essay does something more practical than Steyerl’s: it walks through the metaphors, “cloud,” “stream,” “wireless”, and shows how each one quietly removes the network from the ecology that hosts it. Reading her alongside Ursula K. Le Guin’s line that modern high technology treats the world as disposable was a turning point in how I think about my own tools. The Python scripts, the libraries I lean on, the GitHub Pages I publish to: all of these are not neutral conveniences but parts of an infrastructure with a footprint. This sharpened a choice in my iteration that had been intuitive: when I moved from coded animation toward clay objects with NFC tags, I was not simply adding a “physical” component to a “digital” project. I was acknowledging that the project had always been physical, and that the clay was just a more honest declaration of that. Seu’s writing helps me argue that the handmade element is not nostalgic; it is ecological literacy.

8. Menkman, R. (2011) The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (Network Notebooks 04).

Menkman’s book was the reference that ended my first iteration and made the second one possible. Her distinction between “domesticated” and “critical” glitch, between a glitch that becomes a style and a glitch that pushes the medium past its operating limits in order to expose its politics, named exactly the dissatisfaction I had with my Illustrator corruption experiments. Once the glitch became an aesthetic I could control, it stopped doing critical work. Her claim that every medium has built-in assumptions which look neutral but are not, and that resolution studies is a literacy of the people, the machines, and the people being made by the machines, gave me the conceptual permission to move outward from the software interface to the file format itself. The class-of-formats iteration, and even the later move to text-data held in clay, are both attempts to keep the glitch critical, to keep finding the level of the system at which it has not yet been domesticated.

9. Lialina, O. (2013) Summer [web-based artwork]. Hosted across 21 servers. Available at: http://www.evan-roth.com/olia/summer/ (Accessed: 11 May 2026).

Lialina’s Summer was the project that gave me a working model for what I was trying to do with my 100-HTML-page iteration. Summer is a 21-frame animation of Lialina on a swing, but each frame lives on a different server. When one host goes down, the animation stutters or breaks. The piece refuses to behave as a self-contained file; its smoothness is a temporary effect of an infrastructure that is constantly degrading and being maintained by other people. That structural honesty is what I wanted in my own work. Distributing my image across 100 CSV sheets and 100 HTML pages was a direct response to Lialina: it forced the “image” to depend on the network’s functioning, and made the rendering process visible as labour rather than as a click. Lialina also matters to me because she resists the post-internet smoothness Vierkant proposes; her work insists that the early web’s slowness and fragility were not bugs to be optimised away but conditions that disclosed how the medium actually worked. I return to that argument in the extended analysis below.

10. Mohr, M. (1970) P-032 (Matrix Elements), punched card set. Victoria and Albert Museum collection. Available at: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1242174/po32-matrix-elements-punched-card-set-manfred-mohr/ (Accessed: 9 May 2026).

Mohr’s punched cards interest me less as an aesthetic reference and more as evidence of an earlier moment when the image and its underlying data could still be held in the same hand. The card is the instruction and the trace at once; the image it generates is downstream of an object you can physically touch, sort and stack. For my project this is a useful historical counter-image to the seamlessness of contemporary software. The Illustrator file or JPEG hides everything Mohr’s card displays: there is no equivalent gesture for holding the data of a Photoshop image. My clay-and-NFC pieces are partly a contemporary echo of this logic. Each lump of clay is a card, in the sense that it carries instructions for re-assembling something visual, and Mohr’s work helps me argue that this is not a craft retreat but a return to an earlier, more honest relationship between image and data.

11. Chan, J. (2014) ‘Notes on Post-Internet’, in You Are Here: Art After the Internet. Manchester: Cornerhouse / SPACE. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/7508373/Notes_on_Post_Internet (Accessed: 12 May 2026).

Chan is the writer who gave me permission to disagree with Vierkant. Her critique, that the literal translation of digital files into physical objects can feel “conceptually unsatisfying” because the artist’s hand and their relationship to the technology become invisible, named a discomfort I had with my own earlier iterations. When I exported the CSV as a spreadsheet or rendered the same image in eight formats, the work risked becoming a tidy demonstration of a thesis Vierkant had already stated. Chan’s phrase “hybridise or disappear,” borrowed from Oliver Laric, is now something I test my own decisions against. The shift toward hand-shaped clay objects holding URLs is partly a response to this: the hand is back in the work, and the relationship to the technology is awkward, slow, and visible, rather than smooth and seamless. Chan also reminds me that post-internet practice has often been more about hype-cycles than critique, and that my project needs to resist becoming yet another formal exercise in the same idiom.

12. Gollan, C.A. (2012) ‘User-Generated Content’, pooool.info. Available at: https://pooool.info/uncategorized/user-generated-content/ (Accessed: 10 May 2026).

Gollan’s essay was where I first encountered the argument that hacking on top of an existing system inherits the biases of that system, that emergent bias, in Friedman and Nissenbaum’s sense, follows the code even when it is repurposed for critique. This was a difficult reference to sit with because my whole practice in Unit 2 has been a form of repurposing: writing Python on top of rawpy, publishing on GitHub Pages, using NFC chips manufactured by companies whose values I have not examined. Gollan does not let me off the hook for any of that. But the essay’s introduction of Nelson’s Xanadu as a different digital that never happened gave me the conceptual link between my interest in ownership (from Groys) and my interest in physicality (from the feedback). The clay pieces are my attempt to take Gollan’s challenge seriously: not to discard the system, but to build a small, deliberately friction-ed alternative that knows what it inherits.

Extended Critical Analyses

Project: Olia Lialina, Summer (2013)

Olia Lialina’s Summer (2013) is a 21-frame web-based animation of the artist on a swing. Its central conceit is structural rather than visual: each of the 21 frames is hosted on a different server, and the “animation” is what happens when a browser is redirected through that chain of hosts in sequence. The image you eventually see, a looping picture of Lialina swinging against a graded blue sky, is therefore not stored anywhere as a single file. It is a temporary effect of an infrastructure that has to be running, in 21 different places, at the moment you load it. When one of the host servers fails, the animation falters, and the work briefly reveals what it has always been: a distributed performance staged by other people’s machines.

The position Lialina takes is that the medium of the early web, its slowness, its server-dependence, its visible plumbing, was not a problem to be optimised away but a condition that disclosed how the network actually worked. As Rhizome’s editorial note observes, Lialina was not romantically attached to slowness when she made My Boyfriend Came Back from the War in 1996; she was as frustrated as any other user. The work functioned within a specific technical context. What changed is the context, not the work, and that change has exposed what was always structurally true.

Formally, Summer commits to its position in ways that a more polished post-internet work would not. The image is not particularly high-resolution. The cropping is awkward. The host URLs are visible if you watch the address bar. There is no pre-loader, no fallback, no graceful degradation; if a server is down, the animation simply stops, and you are left looking at a broken link. These are all decisions, not failures. They keep the viewer aware of where the work physically lives, and they refuse the contemporary expectation that a web experience should feel weightless. In this sense Summer is exactly the kind of work Hito Steyerl has in mind when she writes about the poor image: it is not poor by accident but poor as a strategy of disclosure.

Read alongside Vierkant, Lialina sharpens my position. Vierkant’s diagnosis that the digital image is no longer fixed but in flux across many instantiations describes Summer accurately, but Vierkant treats this as something to be embraced through smooth translation between media. Lialina treats it as something to be exposed, by deliberately refusing smoothness. Where Vierkant’s image-objects move easily between PDF, sculpture and screen, Lialina’s animation insists on staying inside the network it was made for, and breaks instead of adapting. This is Jennifer Chan’s critique of Vierkant in practice: the artist’s hand and her relationship to the medium remain visible because the medium has not been hidden behind a finish.

For my own project, Summer was the reference that made the 100-HTML-page iteration possible. I had been trying to find a way of breaking up the smoothness of an image so that its dependence on infrastructure became visible, but I had been doing it inside a single Python script, which meant the infrastructure was hidden inside my own machine. Lialina’s decision to distribute the frames across 21 servers gave me a model for distributing the rendering of my image across 100 CSV files and 100 HTML pages. Each iteration of the image lives on its own page; the progressive rendering only works because GitHub Pages is serving each of them. The clay-and-NFC work extends this logic one step further, so that even the URLs require a physical object to be retrieved. Lialina also keeps me honest about scope: she needed 21 frames and a willingness to let the work fail, not 100 servers.

Text: Boris Groys, In the Flow (2016)

Boris Groys’s In the Flow (Verso, 2016) argues for a fundamental shift in how we understand the relationship between art, the viewer and the medium under conditions of networked digital reproduction. The book’s central claim, for my purposes, is that the digital image is not a thing but an event: the image file is invisible, and what we call the image is the performance of that file each time a viewer summons it. Groys compares the digital image to a musical score, silent in itself, audible only when performed, and concludes that digitalisation turns visual art into a performing art. The aura that Walter Benjamin located in the original artwork, and that he saw as dissipating under mechanical reproduction, returns under digital conditions in an inverted form: it now belongs not to the file but to each individual visualisation.

Around this central claim, Groys argues that the internet functions more like a church than like a museum, and that with the death of the offline spectator we have gained a new, universal kind of viewer whose every act of looking is recorded. The act of contemplation, which in offline conditions leaves no trace, leaves a trace online, and that trace destroys the ontological autonomy of the viewing subject. He also describes a kind of textual rebellion against this: Steyerl’s poor image, with its dubious genealogy and deliberately misspelled filenames, is for Groys an attempt to give the circulating digital file back something like a body.

Formally, In the Flow does its own argument on the page. Groys writes in short, recursive essays that re-state and slightly modify the same set of claims from different angles. The prose is plain almost to the point of austerity, and this restraint is part of the position. He is writing about a condition in which images and texts circulate too quickly to be read carefully, and his response is to slow the reader down through deliberately patient repetition. The book’s cover, a moiré of dots forming the title, performs the same logic: the words exist only as an effect of an underlying pattern, and that effect is only legible if you stop and look.

In the Flow has reframed my project in two key ways. The first happened around the question of loss. I had been working under the assumption, inherited from a romantic reading of Benjamin, that the digital image is a degraded version of a physical original, and that my work was about recovering some of what had been lost. Groys does not let me keep that framing. For him the digital image is not weakened by reproduction; it is performed by it, and the viewer is absorbed into the data of that performance rather than standing outside it as a spectator. After reading this, my eight-format study stopped being about quality loss and became about the impossibility of a neutral encounter. Each format, DNG, TIFF, PNG, WebP, JPEG, GIF, performs the viewer back to themselves and to the network that delivers it. The class system of formats I describe in my presentation is, in Groys’s terms, a series of different performances of the same invisible file.

The second reframing came through Groys’s passage on online contemplation leaving a trace. I had not previously understood why ownership of a digital image felt like such an emotionally charged question in my project. Groys made it legible. If the act of looking online is no longer separate from the act of being recorded, then watermarks, passwords and physical containers are not eccentric attempts to commodify culture but attempts to recover an offline mode of contemplation, a mode in which the viewer is not automatically absorbed into the work’s metadata. This is what my clay-and-NFC pieces are reaching toward. When someone has to hold a small piece of clay in their hand to scan an NFC tag, the act of looking is briefly returned to a body, in a room, doing something specific, rather than to a logged session on a server. Vierkant gives me a theory of the post-internet object; Groys gives me a theory of the post-internet viewer; my project is the attempt to keep both in view at once.

Line of enquiry

I’m starting this brief late, so what follows is less a description of finished iterations than an honest map of where my thinking is sitting right now. Across Unit 1 and the questions I kept asking in Methods and Media for Digital Culture, the same thread keeps surfacing: what does it mean to make work inside digital systems that you also want to critique? I asked it in different shapes each time. In Methods of Investigating, it became a question about surveillance and how soft control hides behind seamless public space. In Methods of Cataloguing, it became a question about who gets to write history and what an archive quietly leaves out. In Methods of Translating, it became a question about how much can be communicated through reduction rather than excess. What I’m taking into these 100 iterations is the suspicion that all three of those questions are really one question wearing different clothes. They’re about visibility. About what a system shows you and what it keeps out of view. So my snippet, the iteration zero, is going to come from the haiku generator I built in p5.js, because it’s the place where this question sits closest to the surface. I want to use the iterations to test whether a tool can keep its own workings legible while it works, and what happens to meaning when reduction, friction, and limitation get treated as the medium rather than something to design around. I don’t know yet what the iterations will become. That’s part of the point of starting.

Annotated bibliography

1. Lialina, O. (2015) Turing Complete User. Available at: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/ (Accessed: 26 April 2026).

“Computers became doors without doorknobs.” Brenda Laurel, cited in Lialina

This line keeps haunting me. I’ve been quoting it back to myself every time I open a piece of software and feel like I’m being walked through a corridor with no side rooms. Lialina’s argument that the user has been quietly written out of computing is what made me pay attention to my own habits in the first place. I noticed I’d stopped questioning anything. The defaults felt like physics. Working through these iterations, the doorknob image became practical advice rather than just a metaphor. Every iteration I make, I’m trying to leave the doorknob on. Show the seams. Let the next person see how it was made and break it apart if they want to. This sits behind everything in my project, but it especially shapes the moments when I’m tempted to smooth something over for the sake of looking finished.

2. Seu, M. (ed.) (2023) Cyberfeminism Index. New York: Inventory Press.

“The internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.”

Seu started this project as a Google Sheet and let it grow into a book that nearly a thousand people contributed to. The form is the point. I keep coming back to the Index because it makes a different kind of argument than most theory does. It doesn’t try to define cyberfeminism, it just gathers it, accepts the contradictions, and lets the reader find their own thread. That gave me permission to stop trying to make my iterations cohere into a single statement and let them act like an index too, with patterns that emerge across the set rather than within any one of them. There’s also something useful in how Seu treats infrastructure as content: the Google Sheet, the website, the book, all carry the same material into different conditions. My iterations work that way as well. The same small idea keeps moving between p5.js, print, and screen, and what changes each time isn’t the content but what the medium will let it do.

3. Menkman, R. (2011) The Glitch Moment(um). Network Notebooks 04. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

“The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be, no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.”

Menkman gave me a way to think about error as material rather than failure. Most design training pushes you to clean things up, debug, polish out the artefacts. Menkman flips that: the artefact is the thing. The compression, the corruption, the moment a file doesn’t render the way it’s “supposed” to, that’s where you can actually see the system you’re working inside. Reading her alongside making my iterations changed how I treat the moments when my code doesn’t behave. The haiku generator produces nonsense regularly. Words land in the wrong order, parts of speech mismatch, the rhythm collapses. I used to fix those. Now I keep them. Some of my best iterations are the ones where the reduction went too far and broke the meaning open. Menkman taught me that’s not the iteration failing, that’s the iteration showing me where the rules of language and the rules of code disagree.

4. Chang, S. (2024) We’re All (Folk) Programmers. Available at: https://joinreboot.org/p/folk-programmers (Accessed: 26 April 2026).

“Folk programming is the (re)programming we learn through our active use of the Internet and software.”

Chang reframes coding as something more like cooking or storytelling than engineering, a vernacular practice ordinary people have always done, just under names that didn’t sound technical. This matters to my method directly. I’m not a trained programmer. The haiku generator I built is held together with YouTube tutorials, the RiTa.js documentation, and a lot of trial and error. For a long time I thought that meant the work was somehow lesser, that real tools came from real engineers and what I was doing was a pale imitation. Chang lets me drop that. The iterations are folk-programmed by definition: I’m using libraries other people made, snippets I copied from forums, things I half-understand, and bending all of it to do what I want. That’s not a flaw in the work. That’s where the work lives. It also reframes who the iterations are for. Not other designers in some imagined critical-design audience, but anyone who has ever pasted code they didn’t fully understand into a project and made it run.

5. Giampietro, R. (2003) Default Systems in Graphic Design. Available at: https://linedandunlined.com/archive/default-systems-in-graphic-design/ (Accessed: 26 April 2026).

“Default systems are machines for design creation.”

Giampietro is the reference that holds my critical position. He’s the one who lets me name what I’m pushing against. The reason I’m writing my own tiny tools instead of working in Illustrator isn’t aesthetic preference, it’s political. I just didn’t have the vocabulary for that until I read him. Giampietro shows how the menus, presets, and defaults of design software aren’t neutral conveniences, they’re machines that produce a particular kind of look and a particular kind of thinking. Reading him alongside making the iterations made me realise how much of my work in Unit 1 had quietly been shaped by what Adobe makes easy. The iterations are partly a way of unlearning that. They’re deliberately small, and the choices they offer are the ones I built, not the ones I inherited from a software company that doesn’t know me and isn’t designing for me.

6. Kaiser, A. and Stephany, R. (eds.) (2021) Glossary of Undisciplined Design. Leipzig: Spector Books. (Entry: M for Monster’s Tools.)

“M for Monster’s Tools” — entry from the Glossary of Undisciplined Design, a feminist unpacking of graphic design’s “dogmatic rules, discriminatory structures and a particularly one-sided canon.”

The Glossary refuses the format of the textbook. It moves alphabetically through visual essays, poems, advertorials, speculative tales, and the entry on Monster’s Tools especially keeps coming back to me. It picks up Audre Lorde’s “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and asks what a different kind of tool might look like, one that doesn’t politely participate in the system it claims to critique. That question is doing a lot of work in my iterations. I keep checking myself: am I making something that actually works differently, or am I just making Illustrator-shaped objects with a slightly weirder surface? The Glossary’s answer is that the form has to be undisciplined too. A tool that’s monstrous, that refuses to behave, that breaks the discipline before the discipline can absorb it. That’s the standard I’m trying to hold the iterations to, even when I don’t always meet it.

If no playing here, see the OneDrive link:

https://artslondon-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/v_kvon1220201_arts_ac_uk/IQB0ner3UYr8SYBmUjG8qg1gAdPYhWydX23e1i4zXuE-hvA?nav=eyJyZWZlcnJhbEluZm8iOnsicmVmZXJyYWxBcHAiOiJTdHJlYW1XZWJBcHAiLCJyZWZlcnJhbFZpZXciOiJTaGFyZURpYWxvZy1MaW5rIiwicmVmZXJyYWxBcHBQbGF0Zm9ybSI6IldlYiIsInJlZmVycmFsTW9kZSI6InZpZXcifX0%3D&e=hpI3UX

If video not available here, see in OneDrive:
https://artslondon-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/v_kvon1220201_arts_ac_uk/IQBxevLUCaCeRKvUFtGhPjDQAdioq0XRdmOSyvG1UtTfBj0?nav=eyJyZWZlcnJhbEluZm8iOnsicmVmZXJyYWxBcHAiOiJTdHJlYW1XZWJBcHAiLCJyZWZlcnJhbFZpZXciOiJTaGFyZURpYWxvZy1MaW5rIiwicmVmZXJyYWxBcHBQbGF0Zm9ybSI6IldlYiIsInJlZmVycmFsTW9kZSI6InZpZXcifX0%3D&e=d76kx8

Week 1. Draft 1

Opposite to the spectacle there is an idea of mundane — something, that usually goes unnoticed and overlooked in the flow of life. While TouchDesigner heavily prioritizes wide crowd in a real-time setting like shows/concerts/performances which is evident from its description by Derivative:

TouchDesigner is a visual development platform that equips you with the tools you need to create stunning realtime projects and rich user experiences.

It becomes clear that the TD serves as a amplifier or a bridge between the source of the ‘spectacle’ and its’ audience. According to McLuhan media theory (’Media is the Message’) we live in the age that direct people’s minds inwards, shifting the attention from collective thinking and knowledge, towards encouraging personal opinions and perspectives. So, similarly, I want to walk away from the collestivism in consumption of ‘spectacle’, the initially created purpose and context of TouchDesigner, and reimagine this tool as a way to turn back technology from maximalism and ground it in a more simple and whimsical use. Based on the aesthetics that derive from the use of TouchDesigner it feels like there is a specific aesthetic that emerges from all these node manipulations, so I’m calling back it to the mundanity and the opportunity for the tool to participate in small life interactions.

Week 2. Draft 2

Opposite to spectacle is the mundane — the small, repetitive, almost invisible texture of everyday life that usually goes unnoticed in the flow of routines. TouchDesigner, however, is commonly positioned as a tool for amplification: it is built to make things bigger, brighter, louder, and more collectively consumable in real time. Derivative describes it as:

TouchDesigner is a visual development platform that equips you with the tools you need to create stunning realtime projects and rich user experiences.

In this framing, TouchDesigner becomes a bridge between a “source of spectacle” and its audience — an infrastructure for attention. But I want to work against that default direction. McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message” helps me see TouchDesigner not as a neutral container for content, but as a medium that already carries cultural expectations: speed, spectacle, responsiveness, scale, performance. If the tool’s cultural message tends toward maximalism, my enquiry becomes: what happens when I deliberately misuse this medium for something quiet, partial, and small? How does technology look like when it becomes intimate and private?

Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s Adhocism (the case for improvisation and hybrid making) offers a lens to re-read my process. Adhocism values provisional solutions, repurposing, and making-with-what-is-available rather than designing toward a single polished “ideal.” This feels strangely aligned with node-based working: TouchDesigner’s logic is literally connective tissue — patching, rerouting, testing, breaking, recombining. The “look” that emerges from these manipulations is not only visual; it is procedural. A TouchDesigner patch often records its own thinking: a visible chain of decisions, quick fixes, and discoveries.

Through Adhocism, I can reframe my project as an attempt to turn TouchDesigner from a spectacle machine into a tool for everyday noticing. Instead of using realtime to impress a crowd, I want to use realtime to acknowledge micro-interactions — tiny gestures, idle rhythms, near-unremarkable changes. That shift also connects to practitioners like Chia Amisola or Spencer Chang, who intentionally use technology in non-efficient ways: not to optimise outcomes, but to create space for curiosity, friction, and gentle play. Their approach gives me permission to treat TouchDesigner less like production software and more like a sketchbook for living systems.

The tension I need to hold is this: how do I “show” the mundane without turning it into spectacle? If I amplify an ordinary moment too much, it becomes performance again. So the next step in my enquiry is to design constraints that protect mundanity: slower feedback, quieter visuals, smaller scale, imperfect responsiveness, and an aesthetic that feels like a side-note rather than a headline. In tutorial, I want to discuss whether adhoc, improvised patch-making can become not only my method, but also the ethical stance of the work — a way of keeping technology grounded in modest, intimate life.

Week 3. Draft 3

Opposite to spectacle is the mundane. It is the small, repetitive texture of everyday life that usually slips past attention. But when we talk about the “possibilities” of technology, we often talk in the language of spectacle. Speed, quality, seamlessness, connectivity. It can feel almost religious, like technology is the answer to everything no matter what the real problem is. With that attitude comes a kind of fetishisation. We start believing digital tools work magically, which hides labour, social inequality, and environmental cost. And the strange part is that the most powerful technologies do not look powerful. They become invisible because they blend into normal life.

This is what people describe as ambient or ubiquitous computing. Mark Weiser wrote that the most profound technologies “disappear,” weaving into everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. I keep thinking about that disappearance not as a neutral design goal, but as a shift in power. When something feels seamless, we stop noticing it, and when we stop noticing it, we stop questioning it. That logic carries into creative software too. Ease becomes a workflow, then a workflow becomes a habit, and eventually a habit becomes a limit. Without meaning to, we adjust our thinking to the tool. TouchDesigner enters my project as a kind of contradiction inside this story. On one hand, it is framed as an engine of amplification, built for “stunning realtime projects and rich user experiences.” It assumes spectacle. It assumes scale. It assumes an audience. But on the other hand, it refuses to fully disappear. It exposes its structure. You can see the work. You can see the logic. You can see the messy middle. That is why it becomes a useful place to test a different relationship with technology.

So instead of asking “how do I make TouchDesigner mundane” as a visual outcome, I started asking a different question. How can a tool that is built for spectacle be used to build intimacy. Not a totalising experience, but small exchanges you can actually inhabit. If the medium carries its own message(Marshall McLuhan), then using it against its default is already a form of writing back. TouchDesigner’s default might be stage and performance, but I want to treat it like a workbench. Something close-up and domestic.

This is where adhocism starts to feel like a method I can work with. Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation describes improvisation as a design sensibility. Use what is at hand. Make hybrids. Let provisional structures be part of the process, not a mistake. When I look at node-based work through this lens, the patch stops being a pipeline toward a polished showpiece. It becomes an adhoc structure where reroutes, quick tests, and small repairs slowly form a working ecology. The network becomes a record of thought, continious work-in-progress.

That matters because it changes how I think about “control.” It is not about mastering the tool in a heroic way. It is about refusing the feeling that the tool is sealed and untouchable. Audre Lorde’s line about the master’s tools is a warning about uncritical use. If I treat technology as authoritative and inevitable, I reproduce its defaults. But if I treat it as material I can re-route, then the tool becomes negotiable. And negotiation is closer to intimacy than efficiency is.Once intimacy becomes the aim, I need language for what kind of intimacy I mean. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction shifts the story away from heroic tools and toward holding tools. Not the spear, the vessel. I am not trying to build a perfect system that holds everything. I want something that holds fragments. Small signals, half-noticed gestures, quiet loops that do not demand high performance.

This is also why “home-cooked” and “handmade” computing becomes practical for my project, not just poetic. Spencer Chang writes about tools that are personal and emotionally resonant, shaped to everyday specificity rather than universal efficiency. Chia Amisola also writes from conditions of limitation and intermittency, where constraints can create attentiveness instead of lack. Reading them makes me more confident that “less” can be a deliberate design choice, not a failure.

Through my iterations in TouchDesigner, I explored it from a more intimate side. I focused on building a dialogue between the computer and the user in a gentle, caring manner, which is not naturally inherent to mainstream technology. By testing pop-ups, language, and the computer’s responses, I developed the interaction into something more personal and private. Over time, my enquiry narrowed into the tension between the cursor as human input and the pop-up as the system’s interruption, and I used that tension as the main site for designing a softer, more inhabitable exchange.

Rendered Version Draft 3

For the rendered version, I carried forward the idea of the pop-up as “computer language.” I wanted to evoke a controlled sense of chaos, where words appear unpredictably, almost like a glitch or a brief emotional outburst from the system. 

If not available here, please see on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cURFxULyWI_rV1PrqEKXkDjOHhshTU8K/view?usp=sharing