2016 – Digital Art Curation – Projects – UMD

Digital Art Curation Course Projects (Spring 2016)

Everyone in the course is required to study a particular digital work or collection of works and 1) make a case for what about the works is significant to various current and future stakeholders 2) establish a statement of preservation intent that align’s with the needs of those stakeholders and 3) put together a plan that would support achieving that preservation intent.

Below are the projects students have chosen to work on and links to their work in progress. We are working in an open way on this blog to refine our skills at public writing and to invite dialog from a range of different potential stakeholders. So please consider reading and commenting on our writing here. For each piece, I have included the title, the handle of the student working with it, a breif discription. I will be adding links to each of the assignments we create for each work to each of these as well. It was rather challenging to catigorize these, so don’t feel too attached to the headings.

Born Digital Video/Moving Image

Born Digital Musical Works

  • ThruYou, esonnenberg. A series of musical works presented on YouTube and a website created through mixing a series of other individuals videos of musical performances shared on YouTube. Statement of Significance
  • Off Grid: Psychedelic Jazz from the Interweb, Pedro Gonzalez-Fernandez. A musical work that exists as a single video created by mixing together a range of different performances from YouTube. Statement of Significance

Digital Games

Performing Arts

  • Big at Adventure Theatre, smackow. The digital assets created in an adaptation of the movie Big into a musical for young audiences. Statement of Significance

Bots

Web Comics:

Interactive Digital Texts

______________________________________

Digital Art Curation Course Project

Over the course the semester you will work on a series of assignments focused on planning for the acquiring and preserving a born digital work or a collection of born digital works.

If you can find a work that is openly licensed, or if you engage in a documentation project, you can actually end up with an archival information package that contains the preservation copies of digital materials that you can upload to the Internet Archive for them to preserve. If you chose to focus on a work for which you don’t have clear rights to preserve it you can simply do the work you would otherwise do and then just not include the objects themselves.

All of the steps in the process will produce documents that you will publish to the course blog to turn in.

Works You Could Focus On:

You are free to identify the born digital work that you would like to focus on. With that noted, I have pulled together the list below as a set that you are free to work from. All of the works below were selected because of the range of kinds of work the represent and the complexity and significance they bring. That is, everything in this list would be great fodder for the sort of assignments you need to do. You are free to chose something else, but you are just going to need to clear it with me first to make sure that it is a rich enough example for it to really work with the assignments.

  1. The Wilderness Downtown: “The Wilderness Downtownis an interactive multimediavideo coded in HTML5 and was published to show off the capabilities of the new Google Chrome Directed by music video director Chris Milk and involving the work of a number of Google employees led by Aaron Koblin as well as digital production company B-Reel, it features the We Used to Wait song from the Arcade Fire album The Suburbs. It was one of three Grand Prix winners at the 2011 Cannes advertising awards in the Cyber category.” Via Wikipedia
  2. Google Poetry: “Google Poetryrefers to the unintentionally poetic autocomplete results displayed inGoogle search suggesstions, which are often shared in the form of screenshots on the community sites Tumblrand Reddit.” Via know your meme
  3. xkcd: “xkcd, sometimes styledXKCD, is awebcomic created by Randall Munroe. The comic’stagline describes it as a “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”. Munroe states on the comic’s website that the name of the comic is not an acronym but “just a word with no phonetic pronunciation”.” Via Wikipedia
  4. An Island: “An Island is an unconventional music performance film and an abstract documentary about a band and an island. The running time is 50 minutes.” Via project website
  5. The Terrible Secret of Space: “The Terrible Secret of Space is a flash animation based on a prank ICQ conversation in which Something Awful creator Richard Kyanka convinced a stranger he was manufacturing space robots. The chat log also went onto inspire the catchphrase “Do you have stairs in your house?” which is used to identify other Something Awful users in public places.” Via know your meme
  6. Thru-you: “In 2009, Kutiman released “Thru You,” an online music video project, featuring a mixture of samples of YouTube videos, and the video project received more than 10 million views in around two weeks.Time Magazinenamed it one of the “50 Best Inventions of 2009”.” Via Wikipedia
  7. js: “Processing.js is a JavaScript port of Processing, a programming language designed to write visualizations, images, and interactive content. It allows web browsers to display animations, visual applications, games and other graphical rich content without the need for a Java applet or Flash plugin.” Via Wikipedia
  8. We Feel Fine: “We Feel Fine is an interactive website, artwork, and book created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that searches the internet every 10 minutes for expressions of human emotion on blogs and then displays the results in several visually-rich dynamic representations.” Via Wikipedia
  9. ROM TXT: ROM TXTas a twitter bot “searching video game ROMs, tweeting strings of bytes from the ASCII range. Sometimes words. Every 5 minutes, for beauty.” Via The Signal
  10. Two Headlines: “A twitter bot that generates “near-future late-capitalist dystopian fiction but a world where there is no discernible difference between corporations, nations, sports teams, brands, and celebrities?” via The Verge
  11. The Reaction GIF Exhibit: The collection of materials and research that went into “ The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture, which exhibits a set of GIFs he identified in consultation with redditors” via The Signal.
  12. Homestuck: “Homestuckis a webcomic written, illustrated and animated by Andrew Hussie. The series centers on a group of teenagers who unwittingly bring about the end of the world through the installation of a beta copy of an upcoming computer game. The comic consists of a combination of static images, animated GIFs and instant messagelogs, as well as animations and games made with Adobe Flash.” Via Wikipedia
  13. World Without Oil: “World Without Oil(WWO) is an alternate reality game (ARG) created to call attention to, spark dialogue about, plan for and engineer solutions to a possible near-future global oil shortage, post peak oil.”
  14. P5P: “P5P is a collection of generative sketches that you control.” by Beat Raess
  15. The Guild: “The Guildis an American comedy web series created and written by Felicia Day, who also stars as Cyd Sherman (AKA Codex). It premiered on YouTube on July 27, 2007, and ran until 2013.” Via Wikipedia