by Sohyeon Lee, last updated 25.Jan.2023
Beitrag zum Seminar Visuelle Zeitkonzepte bei Prof. Dr. Dieter Daniels und Juliane Jaschnow – Theorien und (künstlerische) Praktiken zeitbasierter Medien
HGB Wintersemester 2022/23
Hello, I’m Sohyeon Lee, and I would like to talk about something maybe personal, but not that personal at the same time. To talk about this, I’m gonna open a website that I made.
What do you do first when you open your eyes in the morning? What do you do for the last before you close your eyes to sleep? I found that quite a lot of people, actually including me, open the day by watching our lovely-designed smartphone.. Our little handy computer. And also, the moment before we fall asleep, do the same thing again.
Is it the thing that we can say good or bad? I wasn’t sure. At least we are told by other people like parents, doctors, teachers, that it’s not good.. Nobody’s saying it’s bad or unhealthy when we wake up or fall asleep by reading a book! Why is it different? Why do I feel unproductive and wasted when I spend so much time with my lil computer? I wanted to find the legitimate reason, so started thinking about this based on the subject “Time Concept” that is our main theme in this seminar.
How do we perceive time? How do we know the time passed? It could be recognised by watching something change, like clock hands going, numbers changing, the sky changing.. Of course, I would say, time perception is not just about recognising, it could be a phenomenological thing to feel as well, but for this time I’d like to narrow the time perception is recognising.
In that sense, If we imagine that we are in a room where there’s no window, door or clock, I don’t think that it’s possible to perceive time. So I thought that perceiving time happens only if a human being is in an environment where their autonomy is assured.
On the web, the whole narrative is proceeded by the interaction from the “user”. Websites don’t work without the behavior of the “user”.
There are two main actions. One is “Click” and the other one is “Scroll”. I’d like to say click is “friction”, that a user can expect that something different is gonna happened or they are moving to other pages. It includes the case of touching the screen of a smartphone with fingers, which is basically from clicking. It’s now just a more automated version of clicking the button of an external device.
On the contrary, the scroll is “following”, that a user can expect that they are still in the same narrative. It’s a kind of a flow. It includes the case of sliding your fingers on the the screen of a smartphon. It’s also an automated version of scrolling as touching is the automated version of clicking.
From now on, I’ll make clap sound when I click in the following presentation.
Here, you can see the site is divided into two sections. As you see, on the left side, there are Instagram reels shown. You can see the scrolling-down action. Short and different contents are shown by scrolling, but they don’t have the same narrative. In other words, they are making a fake flow. This contradiction between the structure and showing makes a fake sense to us like we are experiencing various and not being in a closed place.
Let’s see where you can make a friction (click). There are some buttons: a heart, speech bubble, paper airplane, letters and dots... I’m not going to explain each function of them because I guess you know what these symbols mean already. The thing is, these buttons are also making you just stay in these infinite reels, not allowing you to escape this platform at all, making all the interaction working in the same page.
There are only two ways to go out from this platform is, clicking a “Link in Bio” or “Advertisements” by specific brands that they are paying for this platform. Yes, it is a closed place where the user’s autonomy is gone. Even, not just by this structure, by building an algorithm system to analyse what you are interacting with on this already-closed platform, they make infinite feeds again where you are stuck in.
Now, let’s see the right side. I put several examples that “click” is not only working for moving to other pages but also showing something unpredictable. I’ll just briefly show the artworks of Olia Lialina, Yellowlees Douglas, Mark Amerika, JODI, Constant Dullaart, and Jan Robert Leegte.
If you are so interrupted by the crazy reels, no worries. I made a “friction” that you can escape from this space. Here, you can fully experience the sites. Through experiencing this kind of website, we can look up the analogue aesthetic that is made up with basic HTML and CSS languages. This is not only about the style, but also about the structure. It’s quite semantic, transparent and clear. I don’t feel that I’m stuck in one space. I think there’s a possibility from Netart to think about user autonomy and independency from platforms.
I’m not saying platforms are just bullshit! In this society, since efficiency is such a great virtue, with platforms, it comes easily true. But if we believe it or not, we are living in the world where lots of things we can not understand are happening, especially in the computer technology area, even though we are having the most closest relationship with this. Can we say we are just “users”?
Well, if I think about my every day life, I don’t know when is the moment that I’m not with my computer! So, it’s personally important for me as I mentioned at the beginning of this video. If I go back to the concept of the World Wide Web made by Tim Bernes-Lee in 1989, there was the initial value of openness, freedom, and participation, I think it’s meaningful to think about how’s now.
Back to my question, why is that bad to wake up and fall asleep with our lil computer with social network service platforms? I found the reason is, that we can’t recognise the time easily because we are losing our autonomy by the structure. In this structure, firstly, by doing the repetitive movements we can’t recognise the time. Secondly, by being stuck in one place we can’t recognise the time. We experience those in social network service platforms, like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
So.. I found the reason from this aspect and I would like to do further research! Thanks for watching!
Coming soon...
Reference: A-2. Watching Phone: Image source, https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2019/09/why-it-is-time-to-ditch-the-phone-before-bed/
A-3. Click & Scroll The concept of friction, THE USER CONDITION: COMPUTER AGENCY AND BEHAVIOR by Silvio Lorusso
(V. 1.0, UPDATED: 12 FEBRUARY 2021) https://theusercondition.computer