zomgZACH@SN-6989IDAA.netvigator.com A Love Letter to the Internet Birthdays When I Was 14 Posters Be Anonymous or Become Me Digital Humanism Image May Contain Exhibition Presentation Digital Stories Form Explorations

zomgZACH@SN-6989IDAA.netvigator.com

This work is a physical collection of chat logs, focused around my younger self. While often ephemeral, these chat logs have been given physical form, and once committed to paper are much harder to forget or put away. It can be found at a later date by anyone, regardless of permission.

There were 5 copies of this text made—all but one were placed in bookstores and libraries, among books about history, sociology, anthropology, and plays as a manifestation of digital culture in these physical spaces.

A Love Letter to the Internet

A video performance that links to mass texts sent out to the audience. The video is a love letter to the internet, where the internet is treated as the collection of all my online friends. These friends appear throughout the video as Throughout the video, and even after the video ends, audience members will receive text messages with images or messages pulled from my personal archive of digital ephemera.

Birthdays

A selection of digital ephemera—long forgotten files found on old harddrives, old email accounts, abandoned social media profiles—all related to my personal journey of exploring my self identity.

My search for my identity as a transgender man is impossible to separate from the internet. Growing up in a socially conserviative society, the internet was my safe haven and my confidant. This is my attempt at archiving the best and the worst moments of my journey by presenting my own digital history.
This piece was an exploration of curation—I had a pretty rough time cutting down the files I included because I needed enough to form a narrative but a small enough number of files that it wasn't too overwhelming to understand. My initial pass at this was pretty large and had a lot of repetitive files, so I tried to cull it down into the most important images.

When I was 14

A website that uses the restricted screen size of a mobile phone to tell a story. The user is forced to handle the information with lots of care and attention, otherwise the message is impossible to read.

Look at the website here
A pretty quick study, using simple text on a black background. I thought that this gesture was quick but effective and really spoke to the idea of interface as something to be appreciated.

Posters

Using screenshots and archived photos from more than 5 years ago, these posters are printed on vellum, backlit, and displayed. They depict my online friends, some of whom I no longer have any contact with.
These posters went through many forms. I initially had a set of posters that used applied text, but felt that this treatment didn't really add anything to the images themselves. Instead, I decided to just use the pixelated image, but manipulate that itself to preserve anonymity. The shifting of the eyes was a subtle move that also spoke to the pixelation and glitchy nature of video chats from 2010—the year I was collecting these screenshots.
One other change was that these were originally printed on various papers, before I decided to project them. Projecting them meant that I could light them without additional lightsources—important for my exhibition where everything needed to be lighted.

Be Anonymous or Become Me

A set of posters that provides people with the opportunity to either be anonymous, or to create a persona under my name. The posters have the login information for two emails—anonymouslydigital@gmail.com and zachdeocadiz@gmail.com—and I have periodically tracked what the emails have been used for.
This was more of a quick study. Although I got plenty of content, I think the act of just producing these posters and publishing them was enough for me to be excited about the idea.

Digital Humanism

An open Google Drive folder, giving edit permissions to everyone and anyone. The folder is an open collaboration that invites people to add their thoughts on computing, in an attempt to try give dignity to the computer. To allow the computer to be its own entity that cannot always be measured by human standards.
This was the initial

Image May Contain

A quick exploration of bringing digital phenomenon into the physical world. Pulling from language used by companies like Facebook, who use image recognition on digital images, it translates this growing internet phenomenon into a physical space. With this new technology, how will our digital landscape transform? If faces can be recognized, how does that impact the anonymous internet that I grew up in?

Exhibition

This exhibition was set up in multiple ways. There were a few variations on this idea—I had to finalize set up as I was making it.

Presentation

Please log onto http://digitalhuman.ist to view the presentation. Any comments or questions you might have are welcome in the chat on the website.

Digital Stories—the Book

A book of four parts:

001: Feel
The stories that I want to tell about my digital identities and the digital life that I lived online

002: Talk
An annotated selection of talks with various people I know or knew online

003: Work
A selection of work from this series that discuss my digital identity and digital history

004: Archive
An archive of digital ephemera

Form Explorations

These form explorations were mainly from when I considered my degree project to be mostly about interfaces.

An exploration of how to turn abstract pieces of art into usable interfaces that break the grid structure. However, I thought this was pretty surface level and I ultimately chose not to pursue it further.
Using the interface to tell a story—an exploration of the nature of the interface and treating it as object rather than letting it disappear.
A selection of pure form experiments—how else can we look at interface elements and how can they be used to inform different functions?
An attempt to use these formal explorations of interface in a more story-like manner. I didn't think this was effective since it felt more like a gamification of the story in a pretty kitsch manner.
Exploring ways of giving people different reads of the information