Project #4: 12.04.2008

For my fourth project I have decided to abandon the Flash based digital pieces I've been working with this semester to embrace a medium that goes much better with the spirit of this assignment.

In the spirit of working with the personal, the everyday and the profane, I have decided to open up the workings of my everyday life to the world at large...well, Facebook and whoever else stops in...

On Thursday, December 4th I will be posting a photo of whatever I am doing/engaged in/looking at once every fifteen minutes from the time I wake up until the time I fall asleep on two Facebook albums I have created solely for this purpose.





I came up with this idea after a discussion I had via Facebook with a group of my friends who all live in different places (many of my friends, in fact, don't live in the same city I live in...or the same country, even, for that matter). Even though we all feel connected and close to one another courtesy of digital means like Facebook, one of my friends noted in our casual conversational round that she had no idea what it was that the rest of us did with our time everyday. Living at a distance, we all had no idea what everyone did from sunup to sundown beyond a vague inkling. I think this is one of the curiosities of the digital age - we can know so much about our friends and loved ones but not know what their daily lives are like. The digital has replaced the physical, to a large extent, so I decided it might be fun to reverse that.

I haven't changed my daily schedule or planned any special events - I will do things that are part of my normal schedule for Thursdays and document the mundane as well as the unplanned...things that will probably be weird and slightly uncomfortable for someone who loves to be alone...it will be like having a little audience with me all day... ;)

In order to publicize this, I created a Facebook Event and set up two photo albums - one for daytime photos and one for nighttime images.






Both the event and the albums are open to the public, so anyone who has Facebook (regardless of whether or not we are "friended"), can view and comment on these images.

In using the digital to bridge the gap of time and space, I'm hoping to create a microcosm of a particular point in time that involves an audience that it otherwise wouldn't while sharing information that would otherwise be private.

The following links will take you to the albums themselves:

12.04.2008 Day

12.04.2008 Night

Response #6: The 10 Worst Days of My Life (In No Particular Order)

1. October 23, 2004
2. July 26, 2001
3. November 1, 2005
4. January 18, 1997
5. October 20, 2004
6. December 13, 2005
7. February 10, 1998
8. January 23, 1999
9. Memorial Day 1997
10. January 10, 2006

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Somebody is obviously having a very morbid day... ;) I tried writing another list and found myself coming back to this!

I'm not sure about the second part of this...using a metatext to elaborate...I guess technically, since this blog is in HTML and CSS, this is a metatext already...so I'll just elaborate...
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If I were to develop this idea for Project #4, I could create a multimedia piece suggesting the emotions and events of each day, kind of like a sensory collage of inputs. I could also contrast these bad days with someone else's good days, or interweave them with someone else's bad days. In thinking about this, I am reminded of Akira Kurasawa's film Dreams, which tells the story of a man through 5 of his nightmares. You get to know him and his life through what he dreams about. I think maybe something like that can be done with this idea.