Tag Archives: Posiel

Mini-Assignment 4 (remixes)

Remixing is my bread and butter as a designer. I learnt how to use photoshop while making photo compositions and love to utilize those skills to this day.

Here are three posters I have designed which utilize the concept of remix. All these posters feature their source images from the covers of 1950s golden age comic books. I have doctored the images, manipulated, transformed, recoloured, and gave them extensive typographic treatment.

All three images are a series of advertisements for my philosophy undergraduate journal: Jove’s Bodega.

I hope you enjoy!

Jove's Bodega poster 1

Jove's Bodega poster 2

Jove's Bodega poster 3

Essay: On AI bans in Academia (PUB101)

Word Count: 1197

Slovenian cultural philosopher Slavoj Žižek once explained to a general audience:

“As important as providing answers is…[philosophy] can ask the right questions. There are not only wrong answers, but there are also wrong questions. Questions which deal with a real problem but the way they are formulated, they obfuscate, mystify and confuse the problem [sic].”1

Here, Žižek draws from the long-honoured tradition of the Socratic method. As the stories go, Socrates would accost the knowledgeable men of ancient Athens and question their expertise. The result was always the same: The artists knew little about beauty, the generals knew little about courage, and the leaders demonstrated an insufficient understanding of justice. Why? Because we all harbour unexamined beliefs, and those presuppositions affect our worldview and, subsequently, how we think, act, and shape what we presume is possible. However, the right questions reveal our judgements as limited. Through this process, we can begin to unpack why and how we come to these wrong answers and seek better ones—but first, ask the right questions.

Fast-forward to the end of 2022. Artists, politicians, academics, and everyone on Reddit had contracted fevered anxieties over Open AI’s ChatGTP and Midjourney. It is not a new subject, but one that ebbs into popularity as new problems arise; and is expected to increase as machine learning is further developed and implemented. It is a complex phenomenon with far-reaching material and social dimensions that we have yet to comprehend fully, adding to our collective anxieties. It is as though we are ‘The Mouse’ in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, wearing our wizard hat. We may automate brooms to fetch us water, but what will happen when our machines act out their directives too well? Or at the cost of a catastrophe? We may even discover, as did the Apprentice, that we cannot prevent them from executing the tasks we gave them. 

The most common question one will likely encounter is, “should we ban AI in academia, art galleries, or other specific places or fields of discourse?” While this question can be applied in moderation, for example, limiting AI art from art galleries ensures that human art is celebrated, the position to ban AI in academia is a wrong question which only mystifies the challenges ahead. 

Let us grant for argument’s sake that AI should be banned in schools. What does this mean? In one interpretation, a ban might broadly affect all instances and uses of machine learning in academic writing and research. In contrast, a narrow effect might focus on the most uninspired academic frauds so brazen as to copy-paste complete exposition and argumentation verbatim. 

In the latter narrow sense, some promise is offered in anti-plagiarism AIs which check texts for signs of being generated. In a survey of testing 100 false positive texts (text which humans had failed to identify as generated), preliminary studies showed that AI could isolate a series of common patterns of speech that were indicative of generated text.2 However, the effectiveness of using AI to detect AI plagiarism is not guaranteed to remain an effective solution for long. This is because machine learning is highly iterative, and the mistakes it makes today are likely to be absent tomorrow, which means we will need increasingly more complex checks and balances to catch the more clever forms of academic dishonesty.  

If our ban is targeted in a broader sense to prevent all machine learning from participating in writing and research, I hate to inform you, but the cat is out of the bag. Machine learning and neural networking are already indispensable tools across the sciences and social sciences. So we can see that even if we grant that an AI ban is the correct course of action, it seems increasingly difficult (perhaps impossible) to enforce in a narrow sense and misguided given the current state of computer science and research in a broad sense. 

“Should we ban AI from academia” also treads dangerously close to a Luddite view of technology.  A Luddite generally describes a person who supports a position of technological regress; however, historically, the English Luddites disavowed and destroyed machinery during the early years of the industrial revolution because of their reactionary views that integrating machines would make their labourer obsolete—an anxiety we still possess.3

This historical Luddite also offers an analogy to demonstrate how the wrong types of questions obfuscate the problem. Their conclusion was a simple one. Destroy the machines they perceived as threats to their livelihood. However, they could not articulate that the tension was not man versus machine but between those who sell their labour and those who buy it. It was against the backdrop of industrialization that the asymmetric power dynamic between labour and ownership became demystified, allowing for the observations of Adam Smith and Karl Marx to be actualized. The takeaway of this analogy is that because machines were not banned, we were afforded a clearer picture of labour relationships, ownership and production, and the logic presents something parallel to machine learning. 

While many important questions are waiting for us, we tend to see them when we are staring at them in the face. However, how can we accomplish this while we defiantly close our eyes? Thankfully, not all fields have suffered from this reaction, and as a result, they produce better questions.

We recognize that machine learning reproduces human bias and can even amplify bias4, which raises the question of whether it is possible to remove our unintentional biases from data sets because of its implementation into research. Similarly, automated cars disproportionately hit certain ethnicities5—more examples of biased data sets realized only when vehicles are on the road. This raises another critical question, who is ethically responsible for autonomous machines? Finally, as it stands, the proprietary ownership of these technologies by mega-corporations like Apple and Google leads us to question the nature of knowledge and its ownership. For example, if Midjourney is a simple aggregate of all our collective artistry and ChatGTP is a summarization of our collected works of knowledge, is it right to be owned for profit? All of these questions occur because machine learning is adopted into sophisticated societal roles not despite it. 

While this essay criticizes the conclusion of AI bans as technological regression and for the intellectual deficits they create, I close by remarking that this is not an argument for the laissez-faire adoption of AI and machine learning in academia. We ought to curb academic dishonesty at all avenues, and ChatGTP offers the dishonest a new avenue of play. In addition, AI hallucinations are akin to being lied to by a machine and must be scrutinized meticulously to prevent such hallucinations from becoming institutionalized as knowledge. However, the problem is that these issues already existed before generative text, and a ban on AI will not solve that problem. 

There has always been a market for plagiarism, and scholarly research becomes discredited when new information becomes available. We must take proactive positions regarding our future alongside machine learning. Failure to do so may mean we miss out on the novel and crucial questions shaping future consequences produced by AI’s role in society. 

Bibliography. 

  1. Big Think (Freethink Media), ” Slavoj Žižek – The Purpose of Philosophy is to Ask the Right Questions,” 2017, video, https://bigthink.com/videos/the-purpose-of-philosophy-is-to-ask-the-right-questions/.
  2. Jawahar, Ganesh, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Laks V. S. Lakshmanan. “Automatic Detection of Machine Generated Text: A Critical Survey.” International Conference on Computational Linguistics (2020). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.01314.pdf.
  3. Donnelly, F. K. “Luddites Past and Present.” Labour / Le Travail 18 (1986): 217–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/25142685.
  4. Sun W, Nasraoui O, Shafto P (2020) Evolution and impact of bias in human and machine learning algorithm interaction. PLoS ONE 15(8): e0235502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235502.4
  5. Wilson, Benjamin, Judy Hoffman and Jamie H. Morgenstern. “Predictive Inequity in Object Detection.” ArXiv abs/1902.11097 (2019). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.11097.pdf.

Process Post #8 – Copyright

I’d like to spend this post talking about the world of intellectual property, and the growing dialogue over how to include Indigenous works in copyright law. This is a current topic which includes many people who know much more than I do, but I wanted to use this platform, however small, to raise public perception of such an important concern.

So much of Indigenous knowledge is relayed orally, yet we are offered little to no legal protection over this vital medium. Of course, we still ask for permission to perform drum songs or retell an individual’s story, for example, but we are often not given that same level of respect back.

In Traditional Knowledge Exists; Intellectual Property is Invented or Created, Gregory Younging discusses traditional knowledge. Traditional knowledge is a term for traditions such as agricultural techniques or astronavigation, which are based on experiences passed down through communities and generations.

Many First Nations communities have their own customary laws, which state how a piece of traditional knowledge may be used, whether it be kept to a certain group of people, used in a specific setting, with the guidance of a trusted individual, etcetera.

Despite the longevity of these systems, they are not officially recognized in western law for a variety of reasons:

  1. First Nations people most commonly communicate teachings through spoken word, which means that our knowledge is typically not recorded in written form.
  1. A vast majority of traditional knowledge is reliant on the land it was conceived on, so it may not even be relevant to those outside the community.
  1. Traditional knowledge specifically denotes techniques that have been used for so long that they would automatically be placed in the public domain anyways.
  1. Furthermore, there isn’t always a specific person to which legal rights could be granted to.
  1. These systems can also interplay with eachother in many different ways, which makes it even more difficult to pin them down legally.

One of the biggest concerns with how traditional knowledge isn’t properly covered under western law includes the appropriation of closed practices by people who are okay with encroaching on our intellectual property, provided it is technically legal to do so.

There has subsequently been a push for Indigenous communities to adapt their customary laws into the systems of intellectual property. Unfortunately, many factors including those above make it hard to reconcile these two forms of copyright.

It would be a shame for the preservation of traditional knowledge to be undermined by intellectual property laws that were created and forced upon us, while also not recognizing our complex systems that had worked perfectly fine for thousands of years. 

I hope that eventually traditional knowledge will be held to the same standard as western copyright law, and that we may be protected against appropriation and plagiarism of our work without needing to fundamentally alter our entire systems in order to do so.

☆.

It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! Wait, no… it’s a glory???

During the reading break, I took a trip to Las Vegas. While flying over Nevada I was looking out of the window enjoying the sights of the mountains and desert lands near death valley. In all the flights I’ve taken over the years, I’ve never seen what I was seeing. As we flew above some light clouds I started seeing a rainbow appear, but not any rainbow, this one was circular. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I started to make out the shadow in the center and realized that it was the shadow of our plane in the center of this circular rainbow!

Picture taken of a glory from an airplane of the Nevada desert near Las Vegas
A picture I captured of a glory from the airplane window above the Nevada desert.

According to Paula Ferreira (2022), turns out that this is a rare optical phenomenon that is called a glory. Usually only seen in the right conditions and up high on a mountain or from an airplane. From a mountain, you usually see the observer’s head as the shadow. This phenomenon is caused by the sunlight interacting with water droplets (mist or clouds).

Glory encountered during a hike in An Teallach, Scotland Date: 2005-08 Author: AndiW
Glory encountered during a hike in An Teallach, Scotland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon) Date: 2005-08 Author: AndiW

Or more scientifically speaking, glories appear because of wave interference of light internally refracted within small droplets. Much like how you played with prisms in science class in high school, that is how you get certain colours from white light bouncing off the water droplets. In other words, it’s complicated, but if you would like to learn more about them you can read about it here. I hope someday you get to discover one of your own while adventuring. It is quite amazing to witness.

Schematic animation of a continuous beam of light being dispersed by a prism. Wikimedia Commons.
Schematic animation of a continuous beam of light being dispersed by a prism. Wikimedia Commons.

References

Ferreira, P. (October 5, 2022). “The glory: the science behind a rare optical phenomenon” Retrieved from https://www.zmescience.com/science/physics/the-glory-the-science-behind-a-rare-optical-phenomenon/

Wikipedia (March 24, 2023). “Glory (optical phenomenon)” Retrieved from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon)

Mini Assignment #4 – Remix

For this mini assignment, I chose to make a video edit of all my Splatoon 3 clips I’ve taken since the game’s release last September (minus my embarrassing failures; if you really want to see them check my media tab on Twitter LOL).

I used music made by the synth-pop artist GUM, who you might know as Jay Watson of Tame Impala; his work overlays vocals and creates remixes with itself in really interesting ways! Another reason I chose this song in particular was for the lyrics near the end, which is a sample of Herbie Hancock where he talks about how “[a machine] doesn’t program itself…Yet”. I feel like this entire line of thinking was ahead of its time, especially as the limits of technology are now being pushed past what anyone was ever imagining back then.

☆.

Process Post #8: Remixing Creativity and AI

This week’s reading focused on trending resources that came to be since the ongoing evolution of technology. AI, artificial intelligence is the “simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions” (Frankenfield, 2022) according to Investopedia. Since the development of AI, programs like ChatGPT and DALL-E are now widely used in different aspects of education, personal interest, and work. With the topic of AI, one of the readings elaborated on the use of DALL-E. I found it a helpful article written by William Antonelli. The article even mentions how DALL-E has become so popular lately and how random requests generated from the AI site have been shared on social media (Antonelli, 2022).

Reflecting now, how society moves along with the evolution of computers and human intelligence has also brought us much closer in terms of community through the influence of social media and the internet. An example is this blog here, KeptCollexion. Striving my goal to reach an audience sharing similar interests to build a community is a step toward connecting with others through the internet.

I think that DALL-E is a fun tool to use to let your imaginations go wild, and can contribute to content for this blog. Displayed above are the results of typing “Kirby and Yoshi playing videogames and eating snacks.”

Reference:

Antonelli, W. (2022, June 14). How to use dall·e mini, the viral AI tool that can turn any prompt into a series of pictures. Business Insider. Retrieved March 11, 2023, from https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/dall-e-mini

Dall·E. DALL·E. (n.d.). Retrieved March 11, 2023, from https://labs.openai.com/e/NqKZ4pci4MJ9MQUiqdiahlAW/DdYGYkkVt4SKdlPODnGrzcgw

Frankenfield, J. (2023, January 19). Artificial Intelligence: What it is and how it is used. Investopedia. Retrieved March 11, 2023, from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/artificial-intelligence-ai.asp

Mini Assignment #4 – Make a Remix

“Purple Stain” imagery was created using DALL-E and the video clip was created using Canva

Purple Stain

Purple stain, purple stain

Purple stain, purple stain

Purple stain, purple stain

I only wanted to see you bathing in the purple stain

Purple Stain was created for educational purposes only. All original song lyrics before this terrible remix was inspired by Prince and his original song Purple Rain.

Peer Review #2

Peer Review # 2 This week I am reviewing “VP COLLECTIONS” by Victor. 

Direct Link: http://vpcardcollections.com/blog/evolving-skies-is-the-best-sword-and-shield-pokemon-set/

Screenshot of VP COLLECTIONS By Victor

Theme and Customizations 

Upon first glance at the website, it looks visually appealing and exciting. It has plenty of contrast with the black and white styling. You can tell right away that the content will be about Pokemon in some manner with eye-catching Pokemon artwork on the home page. The website design is exciting and draws you in with lots of great pictures and an amazing about-me write-up of the author. I like that it introduces the author on the home page, where you find out about Victor’s passion for collecting cards. The theme choice looks very professional.

Site Structure and Layout

Kaptelinin, mentions “affordances” and explains that a good design is intuitive. This means website visitors should be able to know how to navigate a site using their intuition. I feel Victor’s site has been built using an intuitive design structure, which makes his site easy to navigate, it grabs the user’s attention, creates interest, and allows your eyes to wander to see what will come next. I love that the content of the website is easy to navigate. 

Usability and Accessibility

I noticed and appreciated right away that Victor included “One Click” an accessibility plug-in on his website. Homer Gaines mentions that 15% of the world’s population has a disability, which makes it important to consider accessibility in website design to be considerate to others that may experience visual limitations. This add-on enhances usability for Victor’s users. Victor keeps a consistent theme throughout his site and his sentences are easy to read.

Typography

In addition to the usability of websites, choosing a readable and appropriate typeface is important as well (Gertz, 2015). Victor uses a readable typeface that fits his theme. He uses contrast effectively which makes it easy to read and navigate. The bolded white categories and titles on the homepage are appealing against the dark artwork.

References

Gaines, H. [UXDX]. (2022, January 27). The four principles of accessibility [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUxx_sq2QdY

Gertz, T. (2015, July 10). How to sur­vive the dig­i­tal apocalypse. Louder Than Ten. https://louderthanten.com/coax/design-machines

Kaptelinin, V. (2014). Affordances. In M. Soegaard and R. F. Dam (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Interaction Design Foundation.

Peer Review #2 – Sammy Universe

This week I had the pleasure of reviewing Sammy’s website, which is suitably titled SammyUniverse. 

Immediately, when opening the home page, the banner had a picture of a planet with the blog tagline. I think the photo she chose ties in with the title of her blog since it is a planet in a “universe,” similar to the universe she created with the website. It is also similar to the header style discussed in the article “Design Machines. How to survive in the digital Apocalypse.” Travis Gertz details this commonly used home page format and attributes the widespread use to the fact that it simply works for many people and companies, creating a trend that can be seen on many other sites. 

After scrolling past the banner, there are some clear template blocks still containing placeholder texts. There are some headings which state that “Music, Film [and] Random Things” are going to be explored. There is also a block with a motivational quote, a few sentences, and a link box; however, the link does not direct the reader to any page. It’s unclear whether this block is a filler or something Sammy wrote but possibly forgot to link. Closer to the bottom, after more filler blocks, there are links to some recent posts and assignments and contact information. I do like the homepage, and the colours of the banner photo match the she chose, but I wish it were more concise and included content from or about the blog. The blog’s footer is a GIF of purple/blue clouds, which I thought was a nice creative touch. I liked that it was moving and matched the other colours of the website; it captures the readers’ attention. Sammy could use this to her advantage and include some social media links in the footer since I didn’t see any throughout the rest of her blog. 

The website’s typography is relatively simple. Around three sans-serif fonts are alternated between writing portions, but they fit the blog’s theme and are easy to read. One header on the Film page includes a combination of two fonts that I found visually appealing, especially with the inclusion of the bolded word. It allows the reader to understand what Sammy is trying to emphasize. 

It could be beneficial for Sammy to consider incorporating more contrasting font styles into her text to allow for variety. 

Sammy’s website has a few different cool aspects that come together to create a captivating user experience. 

Similar to the footer, other movements occur throughout the blog, such as appearing text and images that fall into place when the page is opened. These things grabbed my attention and made me want to keep reading. Next, I really enjoyed the use of images! From a reader’s perspective, there was a perfect balance of photos and text. The pictures were all relevant to the blog’s content and acted as a visual aid. It was especially crucial in the movie reviews and music recommendations, so the reader knows what is being discussed. The music and movies were also linked, which is important when discussing or recommending a piece of media, especially if you want the reader to view or listen for themselves. 

The website layout is unique from other blogs that I have seen. The music and film pages are sole pages and don’t include individual posts, making everything easy to find. The same can be said for the blog content, which is just one long page. On the Posiel page, all the content is separated by each week of class. I found this format to be interesting, but it took some work to navigate. While it was all categorized into Process Post, Weekly Content, and Mini Assignments, it isn’t easy to find what you are looking for if you do not have every week of course content memorized. It would likely be a good idea to title each week and the assignments; doing so would give context to the reader and make it easier for them to find what they need. 

In conclusion, Sammy Universe was a very captivating website that I enjoyed exploring. The theme was consistent throughout the site, and the colours and photos matched the theme or the content. Its general usability is good, but the Posiel page could be easier to navigate. Overall, this blog was fun to review, and I look forward to seeing what else Sammy has to add. Keep it up!

Why Women Kill!!

Tv show called why women kill it has three pictures of women

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across someone on Tik Tok, and they were talking about this show, and I watched about three of their Tik Toks, and I was hooked! I quickly found that Prime had this series and binged watch the whole season in two days. At first, I was confused because it kept going back and forth between three different eras. My favorite period would be the 60s with Beth Ann and her husband, Rob Stanton. I love her relationship with her neighbor Sheila; those two were my favorite. I cannot believe that Beth Ann became friends with Robert’s mistress and lives a double life for awhile while being a housewife, and when her husband is at work, Beth is out roaming with the mistress. Near the end of the series, I was so upset when Robert knew what happened to his daughter but still blamed his wife for the death of their child. Along, Robert knew that his mistress left the gate open, which is why his daughter could leave their yard. With all of Robert’s lies unfolding, she knew there was only one thing to do, which was to murder her husband “by accident.”

I also enjoyed the period when it was Simone and Karl. Everybody loved Simone and Karl until they found out that Karl was gay; everybody thought they could catch a disease when being in the presence of Karl. I found it hard to watch because I can’t believe that’s how they treated Gay men back in the day. Karl had his best friend, Simone, and even though he put her in a tricky situation by coming out as gay, Simone stood by his side the whole time.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic show, and if you haven’t watched it, you should check it out.

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Peer Review #2

For this peer review, I was paired with Jack. You can access his website with this link that is provided ” jackdanielswhiskeyno7.com.” Jack has created a website where he can express his interests, such as photos of the city, nature, and some of the campus. He also posts about his interest in cooking. By the way, his cooking looks fantastic! Unfortunately, many people are in my PUB 101 class, and I haven’t been able to review this one yet. However, once I saw that I had to check his website out, I was pleased. I enjoy looking at what my classmates are doing to their websites.

Theme and Layout

As I started looking through Jack’s website, I thought he had it well organized, and all of his buttons on the top right-hand side took me to where it needed to go. However, while going through his site, I saw how his “Home” page flips through different photos that he has taken. This shows his authenticity because the pictures he provides have been taken by himself. In addition, the way he has his website is structured it is easy for others to use.

Customizations

When I came across the “through my eye” page, it brought me back to one of the required readings that our Professor provided in week 5. In the article “Digital gardens let you cultivate your little bit of the internet | MIT Technology Review,” in the first paragraph, Sarah Garner expresses that her website didn’t feel like her. Garner then came up with an idea to create a page that involved what she was interested in. Jack’s “through my eye page” reflects your “Digital Garden.”

Social Media Integration

As I go through your website, adding your social media pages to your website would be beneficial. I assume you have Instagram, and if I am correct, you probably post more photos of nature, the city, and the water. I would love to see more of your work, you take amazing pictures, and others would enjoy seeing more. But, on the other hand, I could only review so much because you don’t have much posted on your website. I am sure there is a valid reason why you are behind on the assignments we are required to do, but once you are all up to date on the mini assignments, process posts, and peer reviews, your website will come to life. I believe in you; you have done a great job so far! Keep up the excellent work. PS- You should open your own restaurant and display your photography skills.

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What in the world! -Process Post

While reading an article by Bridle, James, “Something is Wrong on the Internet,” Bridle says, “I’ve also been aware for some time of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between younger children and YouTube J.Bridle (2017).” I agree that this generation of children does spend an alarming amount of time on their devices. When I was younger, things were very different compared to nowadays. Although my parents limited my screen time while I was growing up, they preferred I play outside with my friends instead of sitting in front of a TV or computer screen. However, my mom allowed screen time when I was done with my chores, cleaned my room, and completed all my homework; once it was finished, I could surf the web for two hours until I had to start getting ready for bed. My parents were mainly concerned that we would lose our childhood to a phone and laptop screen.

As I started high school, my parents allowed me to have my phone in case an emergency arose. Although there were still some rules to having a phone, she would only pay for talk and text and turned the Wi-Fi off at 9:00 PM to ensure I slept enough for school. Now that I am an adult with my children, I understand why she had those rules. Nowadays, some horrific things are on YouTube, and I monitor what my daughter watches. Before I had any children, I remember YouTube kids were in the hot seat because some harmful content was being put on a kid’s app. This YouTube video details what was being put out on YouTube kids’ (99) YouTube Kids app and disturbing content – YouTube. Now that my daughter is two years old, I heavily monitor what she watches on YouTube. Even though I was vigilant about what she watched, she sat beside my spouse one day and started crying. As she passed her iPad to me, I looked at the video she was watching, and it was about a man finding a kitten on the side of the road inside a box. He grabbed the box with the kitten and placed it in the bank of his truck. The kitten ended up falling out of the box and was looking over the tailgate to look around, and the man went over a speed bump, which caused the kitten to fall out. Right behind the truck was another car driving behind him, and the car didn’t have enough time to stop, so it ran over the kitten, and the kitten died. This is a personal example, but it relates to “Something is wrong on the internet.”

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Process Post 7 (More about Design)

I had already devoted a great deal of my last process post to design. Still, I felt I didn’t capture the assignment to share some examples of websites that got my approval. In addition, I was supposed to talk about marketability next week! It seems I thoroughly confused myself! So I will take a step back and add a bit more about design and share some websites that I find pleasing, as well as show some that I do not care for. 

My love-hate relationship with minimalism

On the one hand, it is undeniable that minimalism deserves its place as a design aesthetic that continues to inspire all aspects of creative works. Websites, architecture, print and digital media, fashion, decor, music, fine arts, pretty much everything. And there are lots of good reasons to prefer a minimalist approach. For example, some people relish a ‘blank page’ approach to organizing their home, which can be important in a world overloaded with clutter, advertisements, people, cars, etc.

We can also make a moral argument that minimalist practices are good and ought to be pursued. Considering we live in a world of overconsumption, rife with gluttonous beliefs that express personal identity through material possession, it shouldn’t be difficult to thread the needle that minimalism offers a method of escape from our accelerated death drive of hoarding clutter.

So what’s the deal? What’s to hate? 

It’s because I think that most forms of minimalism are similar to the practice of ‘greenwashing.’ Greenwashing is usually a form of advertising or marketing spin to persuade the public that the organization’s products, aims and policies are environmentally friendly. But I am using it slightly differently. Instead of being limited to a process used by businesses, minimalism presents itself as a solution to real-world material problems without actually addressing the root of their problems. It’s a band-aid, addressing the symptom rather than the cause.

Too poor to own a house? Try living in a shipping container! I hate that minimalism is so often poverty in cosplay.


Furthermore, since minimalism is also a design trend, plenty of businesses have jumped on board with their website design, yet the outcome often creates cognitive dissonance. Why?

Minimalism is perceived as clean, lightweight, only what is needed, free from clutter, and utilitarian, but rarely does the ethos and philosophy of business correspond to these principles on any meaningful level. They believe in minimalism as a marketing strategy to maximize the consumption of their respective products. 

Let’s look at medium.com

Image of medium.com landing page.

What does this website tell us? It’s no bells, no whistles approach is ‘sleek,’ and its visual hierarchies are clearer for the audience to navigate without any hassle towards its product, which is its news stories.  Little nuggets of information in a world governed by the mantra that information is knowledge, and knowledge is power. For Medium, like all content mills, information is also currency—a worshipped and coveted form of power. 

Sure, it presents those nuggets in a minimalist manner, but then you realize there is an infinite amount of them, and to be sure, it doesn’t want you to take responsible little bites of its product. It wants you to consume its content voraciously. So there we go; we’re back to my objection. We choose minimalism as a function to maximize consumption—an inversion of the ethos of minimalism. And this is my major skepticism towards its popularity.

Yet, just because minimalism functions to obfuscate our relationship with consumption, does that justify an abandonment or wholesale rejection of minimalism? Should it be different?

O-V-E-R-L-O-A-D

My short answer is no. A sense of hierarchy is lost if a website is overloaded with visual elements. The eye feverishly darts from corner to corner in a vain attempt to make sense of the information, the structure, and the thesis. There is a physio-psychological limitation to our cognition, and we can’t make proper sense of overloaded, unorganized things. Therefore, some form of minimalism is not only preferred but necessary.

Case in point: This site.

image of landing page for arngren.com a danish website

UX/UI

I wish I knew more about these topics. It’s obvious that the difference between a good and bad form of minimalism is a matter of how we interact with it rather than what philosophy it proposes.

image of landing page for benjamin-nespoulous.com

I love this website because of its playful interactivity. The elements all have a bit of life to them. They move, expand, contract, become inverse in colouration, etc. It feels alive! Yet the site as a whole is so simple without being boring or cliche. It has a philosophy and functionality that incorporates minimalism without being minimalist. 


Let’s circle back.

Burrito Reproduction utilizes some notion of minimalism, so I couldn’t be so hypocritical as to condemn it completely. Part of the reason is that this course demonstrated that I’m woefully underskilled in coding. I thought I wasn’t so bad, but this whole WordPress experiment has shown me how far I have to travel. Nonetheless, I like the aesthetics of my site. I want to capture that same observation I made with NSPS. That being, it’s functionally minimal but unapologetic and individualistic about the typical conventions found in minimalism.

Moving forward, I will continue to remember the lessons learned from “How to Survive the Digital Apocalypse.” The old normative formats of repeated templates, uninspired content, and failure to express our unique subjectivity as designers, educators, and writers will ensure that narrow AIs will outsource us. We will survive by leaning into our subjectivity, which is exactly what I intend to do. 

Process Post 6 – Getting serious about Analytics

So for this week, I’ve been trying to brush up on my analytics and better understand how to generate more traffic for my site. Admittedly there is a lot to learn!

Of course, I have Site Kit, and of course, I’ve connected that to Google Analytics, but I wanted to take it a step further than that. I want to understand SEO better to make the most out of the data I’m collecting, which means learning a ton of new terminology-all with their strategies.

Social media

I hate social media, for the record. I’ve spent years and years disavowing it. Staying clear entirely. But now it seems like those days are done. I decided social media was the best way to start getting my link out there. But I need a reason to have, say, a Youtube account. Then it hit me. Why not migrate my recent video onto Youtube? Then I can just embed it onto my site! That is a win-win-win situation! First, I don’t have to take up the valuable space on this site hosting a video. Second is that I now have content for youtube, and the third is I have a network to cross-promote.

Okay, so I did it! Here’s the link to my new youtube channel!

I also did a Twitter thing… why in the name of God did I do that?? Recently, I was mentioned on Twitter for my talk at a journal conference, and I felt a bit of FOMO not being able to reply to thank them for the shout-out. Keeping in line with my goal to get serious about my promotions, I bit my tongue and signed up. Now I can promote new pages and at least squeeze a bit of analytics out of it.

So here I am on Twitter.

That’s it for Social media.

SEO

Another step I’m taking is to hone in on some SEO research. Last week, I decided I wouldn’t mind a side hustle as a copy or content writer. In addition, how cool would it be to generate money from this little publishing experiment? BurritoReProductions isn’t meant to be a content mill. Still, at the same time, it would be kinda cool to build a subdomain to showcase some content and copywriting to give me future opportunities. This week I’ll analyze the data and see which keywords and topics are naturally coming up as a launch point. I also plan to look at more trending topics and see if I can write a few samples in the vein of those topics.  We’ll see how it goes!

I also want to start cross-posting… I wonder who among my classmates would be interested in some cross-posting mutually beneficial marketing.

Design

I’m still struggling to find my own in the design side of things. I don’t know what I want it all to look like. I’ve tried many variations but keep returning to this green page. It’s my fallback! I’m trying to stay positive, though. I know that perfectionism kills progress. It may not be what I want, but it gives me a platform to work from. I will keep playing around, and hopefully, something will become of it. But I’m no longer as concerned about the design as earlier this semester.

I enjoyed reading the article “Design Machines: How To Survive the Digital Apocalypse.” Not only is it fantastically written, but its design is also exquisite. There was so much that I had intuitively felt was true but had not quite found the words to express for myself. That we exist in a copycat culture or that so much content online is crap—crap selling crap. Or something not necessarily addressed but of the same vein, that AI templates are quickly becoming the norm for content, only adding to the tensions raised in the article.

I’m unsure how to employ best what I learned from the article. I think it’s just food for thought. I’m tempted to say we need to act more authentic in our publishing spheres because if we become too complacent with that cookie-cutter style of content creation, we will be outsourced by automation. The one thing we have to offer that our machines can not is our humanity, warts and all.

Process Post 2: Personal Cyberinfrastructures

What is a personal cyberinfrastructure, and why should you care? What is your current cyberinfrastructure, how do you use it, and how does it use you? What do we take for granted in how the Internet works? What can we imagine differently? We will work on vision boards. By now, you will have completed your vision board. How did you work through the process? Did you use Venn diagrams? Were you able to narrow down your focus? Please post about the process.

Process Post Prompt*: Write a blog post about the installation and setup work you did this week: your decisions, your rationales; make sure you link out to at least a couple of other resources. How does what you’ve created so far relate to the vision board you made last week?

I had a lot of trouble setting up my blog. For some reason people could never access the blog and it was a slow process of fixing the issue. On top of that I messed up along the way and had to start all over again which had me falling behind. But, even if this seemed annoying at the moment, it ended up being a blessing in disguise. Initially the idea I had for my blog was to talk about my mental health journey and hopefully create a platform where people could relate to me and I could relate to others. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I was missing something. And because I had to create my blog, delete it and create it again, that allowed me the space to really think about what I wanted from this space and what I wanted others to take from it. In the end I though why not connect art and mental health? they go great together and I am really passionate about art, this way I not only reach people who want to read about mental health but also people who are interested in art.

Once I had the idea to combine mental health with art I figured the tagline “For those out there struggling, let this be a place where art heals us” would be perfect. It suddenly came to me and it was just what I was looking for because it encompassed what I wanted this space to be. I wanted to create a place that would function as a sort of journal about my life and my struggles but also have people interact if they wanted to. And I wanted to include art because as my struggles with mental heath grow, my passion for art grows too and sometimes I feel like I cannot separate the two.

Because mental health can be triggering to talk about, I knew I had to include a resources page in case someone found themselves in need of more help than the one peers could provide. And I also wanted to have a community space where we had some ground rules about respect and kindness but where we could still connect with each other. I have never managed a space before, never managed comments and I am very nervous about people going crazy and being disrespectful and how to deal with those situations that arise on the internet because of the anonymity it allows. I guess I will face that as I go because I don’t really expect a lot of people to visit my page anyways.

I though really hard about whether I wanted to make this page anonymous or not. It felt almost too uncomfortable to be so transparent about my struggles and be open about my identity. I was not sure where to put the boundaries so that I would not feel like I did myself a disservice later on. I am still a little on the fence about anonymity. I think I could be more transparent if I did not have my face and name on the page but other times I think having that restriction on myself is good because I do not what to share too much. In class we thought about the question: Are we able to present ourselves however we want, or are we being controlled by who we think my be watching our personal cyberinfrastructures? And I as I think about the kind of platform I am creating and the kind of audience it might have I definitely find myself constantly thinking about the audience. They dictate half of my decisions about what to post when it comes to posting something personal. I have to be really mindful of whether this is something I want to share to the world or if I will regret that decision later. I especially focus on questioning whether I would have issues with my family or friends reading my posts and if the answer is yes then maybe I should not share what I want to. I would not say my audience controls my decisions on what I post but they definitely come into play when I am filtering topics for my posts, but in the end, because this blog is very personal, I am the one who decides what I want to put out there.

Process Post #6: Website Design!

This week’s lecture was especially interesting and different from the previous classes. We had a guest speaker come into class. Mauvé Page is a designer and a professor at SFU for the publishing department; she talked to us about graphic and website design. 

Reading

This week, I especially appreciated reading the article “Design Machines. How to survive in the digital Apocalypse.” First, it was generally enjoyable to look through, the design was bold but also simple, and the features were interactive and moved as you scrolled. It also sheds light on a homepage design that has become very typical and has overtaken mainstream companies. The author describes the design as a 48pt headline text using the lightweight in white … “perfectly centred over the stock photo of anonymous hands fondling an electronic device” (Gertz, 2015). I found this reading really interesting to go through because it discusses something that I have seen on so many websites. Therefore I was able to look back on my experiences with other websites and notice the specific trend that the author is noticing and talking about. It is fascinating that so many large companies lack and ignore the creative aspects of creating and designing a website and follow the cookie-cutter template/trend that has become prominent.

Website Review

When starting my website and figuring out what kind of vibe and aesthetic I would go for, I did a lot of research and a general google-search for other lifestyle blogs. One blog that I found that had a fairly unique blog design was Amber Fillerup Clark’s blog. Her blog is a lifestyle one, where she talks about her own life, and her blog has expanded as she had kids with her husband. 

What I like about her homepage and general website design is the off-white background and the consistency of the editing and colours of the images she uses. I appreciate that she edits her photos in a specific way that makes them appealing and coherent when looking through her posts.

The pink sidebar that is pictured moves through her posts every few seconds, which I found to be a cool addition; and a feature that helps with audience engagement since it can catch your attention. I also like the colours she uses; I find them very appealing and soft; and how the rest of the website is relatively symmetrical. One thing I don’t think works as well or could be improved is the typography. In my opinion, none of the titles or headings stand out enough to read; they don’t catch the user’s eye. Perhaps they could be in a larger typeface or bolder. 

Peer Review #1 – The Stars, Too

This week, I got to explore Ryn’s website: The Stars, Too. At first glance, I appreciated the minimalism of the website. The site was very easy to navigate: all the content was in its appropriate place and category. It was also helpful that the ballet and theatre posts were separated into their respective categories. The primary colours are black and white, which I enjoyed because it allows the blog images to stand out even more. 

I was intrigued to learn more about the blog since the home page was so simple, so I went onto the About page. The information on that page included the author’s name and a brief explanation of what the blog was for. I was hoping for additional general information about the writer and the blog. Ryn may consider including some detail about why her blog topics are of such interest to her. Although I understand why there wasn’t a photo of the writer, since it’s a blog about theatre and ballet, it could be beneficial to include a personal photo. The image doesn’t necessarily need to be of the author, but it could be a photo she took of the theatre or ballet to help create a more personal connection between the writer and the reader. 

However, it is possible that Ryn has done this purposefully, with a specific intent in mind. Her reasoning could relate to our class reading, Self-Presentation in Social Media: Review and Research Opportunities. This paper by Erin E. Hollenbaugh aims to view how people present themselves on online platforms and allows for a certain degree of anonymity (Hollenbaugh, 2021). Evidently, every person with any media presence chooses what they want to be shared on social media; therefore, there remains anonymity within the aspects that are not shared. Not only this, but John Suler also discusses the concept of anonymity in his article, The Online Disinhibition Effect. He states that “anonymity works wonders for the disinhibition effect” (Suler, 2004). Perhaps Ryn’s degree of anonymity serves a purpose for the overall goal of her blog.

In contrast, my peer’s blog posts were filled with content! (See theatre here and ballet here) She provided extensive detail in her reviews of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Mayerling (a ballet). I was impressed by the amount of detail put into writing each post. The writing style was easy to follow, and I could clearly understand what my peer was writing about. 

The process posts provided the reader insight into the work being done on the website each week. This included some setbacks and advancements that were involved when creating their website. She also incorporated information and knowledge from the course readings into these posts, making it clear that they were read and understood well. 

To speak on the written work on the website, Ryn did an excellent job. Her writing has no grammatical errors, and the vocabulary choices were very fitting. Not only this, but it was clear that the word choices were used in a way that allowed the reader to understand the writer’s main point better. To add, the writing choices also accurately reflected the writer’s tone, and the illustrative vocabulary complimented the blog topics (theatre and ballet) very well.

To conclude, Ryn’s blog provides a wonderful platform for lovers of the fine arts to go and read about various pieces. The blog is simple and to the point, with the writing being easy to read but appropriately elegant at the same time. These content pieces on my peers contribute to developing her online self. Her interests are apparent, and she aims to speak on these interests throughout her blog posts. 

Peer Review 1 – Spinning Stufful

Spinning Stufful is an adventure log that stores the adventures Becca goes on as she transits to other places while spinning poke stops and catching Pokemon.

A really simple design with just three colors—white, yellow, and grey—welcomes me as soon as I approach the website. I am immediately drawn to the yellow text that directs me to what Becca’s blog is about and what content her blog features. As someone who is not too familiar with Pokemon, I would love to see some colours that correlate to Becca’s adventures or related to Pokemon to link the game to her blog. However, I appreciate Becca’s current theme since it draws my attention to the first thing I would want my reader to read, which is what the site is about.

Spinning Stufful Homepage

Exploring Spining Stufful gives me a sense of who Becca is. However, because her blog is still in its early phases, it is not fully developed. I’d like to learn more about her adventures and get a feel of who Becca is, as well as her relationship with Pokemon, as I’m sure her love for this game stemmed from a certain moment in her life.

As well as, Becca can do some very creative things with her blog and generate a community of Pokemon players to relate to her adventures and she begins to do so by inviting her readers to become friends with her on Pokemon Go.

Spinnning Stufful’s Pokemon Invitation

I love the intention of this but I do find that this method is inconvient to the reader because they essentially need to go out of their way to message and wait for a reponse. This method can lose potential readers who would like an additional friend on Pokemon Go. I think a way to help attract more readers to befriend Becca on Pokemon Go is inserting a QR code or inserting an image of Becca’s trainer code.

In conclusion, Spinning Stufful is off to a great start and I believe that Becca can have so much fun with her blog in some really cool and unique ways. I’m excited to see how Becca level’s up Spinning Stuffuls.