#4dassignment

Haiku's have strict structures, and thematically they reference nature. This works out beautifully because I love structure, and I can connect back to naturally occurring spirals. After reading the Kaveh Akbar reading, I decided to include haikus in some of the digital landscape.

These digital nature-scapes are a curated illusion. Offering the appearance of wildness without unpredictability, beauty without decay. It's seductive, this digital calm; it’s clean, quiet, uninterrupted. But it is also controlled, monitored, and monetized. A haiku about a virtual pond may feel peaceful, sure, but the device it's written on is part of an extractive infrastructure — cobalt mined from the earth, power drawn from fossil fuels, servers cooled by displaced rivers. This “natural” digital moment is propped up by very real, often invisible, violence.

Link↗ Every website created is a world with infinite opportunities, and artists are world-builders by nature. We begin by crafting these worlds for ourselves, and then—through sharing our work—we invite others to explore. World-building isn’t just about creating what exists within the world—it’s about shaping the entire context around it: the language, aesthetic, structure, and underlying rules.

"There is also no state of “completeness” to a website, like a puddle, since they’re ephemeral by nature. Sometimes they can be very big and reflective. Despite their temporal nature, I’ve even seen some creatures thrive in puddles. Meanwhile, some smaller puddles may only last a day."

I knew when I decided to make a collection of audios that I did not want the main host of the collection to be a streaming service like Spotify, or even Soundcloud. My initial idea for 4D was to create an interactive website that would host the audios from the vinyl so that you could explore them without having to have the physical disk. The website would exist as it’s own little world, a micro-site whose only purpose was to be a home the audios, personalized, private, and ever-changing.

The idea of the website was that; visually, it would look like the track list printed on the back of the sleeve. Then you could click on each title to listen to the track. I got the css to work just fine—everything looked perfect—but the Javascript was giving me such a hard time. At the mercy of time, I decided to abandon the website for the submission and instead find an alternative place that was free from monetary barriers and algorithms and interactive.

Link↗ In The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, Yancey Strickler argues that a growing number of people are retreating from the public web into pockets of digital darkness in search of more forgiving spaces for communication. They're seeking out quieter, more private corners of the internet—what Strickler refers to as these “dark forests”. These spaces include private accounts, newsletters, invite-only forums— and any space that lies hidden from the hyper-visibility of the mainstream.