On Thursday I used the laser cutter for the first time, and it was like Christmas. I am playing around with a couple of different physical things that I want to make using this amazing tool, but to start I created a bunch of phone models in clear acrylic and a to-scale cuts of the apps.

I originally cut the clear acrylic scaled phone models with the intention of making a touch register that would have some sort of ‘touch’ indication on each screen (a fingerprint), but perhaps it is too obvious a link to the concept that I am exploring. After talking with Lee about painting as gesture and doing some research on art as ‘faith objects’ in my personal tutorial on Tuesday, I am thinking of exploring the gesture and the magnitude by which we touch our phones in other ways. Too, I am starting to think about exploring the notion of the relationship of touch for objects verses people. However, I am still going to play around and experiment with these acrylic models.

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In addition to creating the touch register, I wanted to explore using texture as a means to make the zine physically interesting. This was the motivation for creating these to scale apps. I want to emboss them with paper and put them in our zine, so that there are pages that are interesting to navigate with your fingers because of the haptics of them. This takes the notion of touching an image for the sake of a visual change (opening an app etc) and makes it about touching an image created by difference in the 3-D space of the paper for the sake of experiencing those changes in the paper’s elevation.

However, in creating this ‘stencil’, I have created some wonderful objects. Even as soon as we pulled the objects out of the laser cutter, Annie remarked that they had a totally different character. After I finish the embossing, I want to play around with reconfiguring the pieces to make something new and strange.

After having my personal academic tutorial with Lee, I was a little shaken. I very much had an idea of where I thought I was going with this project, a touch log of sorts, but I hadn’t made much.

I am fascinated by the gestures that we make on our phones, and I have been thinking about the touch component for a while. However, I hadn’t really considered mapping the idea of touch and gesture onto painting, which Lee pointed out is all gesture. Too, painting is compelling to me for the exact opposite reason that physical interactions between our hands and our phones are. In painting in the traditional sense, every single gesture is made permanent. The work you see is a product of the amount of time a person has sat in front of a canvas and touched it. However, in the case of the phone, we touch this object thousands of times a day, and there is no physicality to the result. Or, there is a physicality, a gross oily fingerprint that you can see on a black screen. In both cases, the action is touch, and the outcome is visual, which is a bizarre divide. However, painting’s touches are inherently physical, and they are precious based on the intent and impression of those touches. Whereas there is a certain nothingness to the tapping of a screen.

I have attempted to explore logging touch in a couple of different ways. I ended up scrapping the Adobe AfterEffect and by making some physical things. I used a piece of acetate over a video of myself touching the phone on an iPad and created a bit of a topographical map of touches for about a minute’s worth of touching on my phone.

I also did a similar procedure by copying the gestures with white paint on a phone sized area of my sketchbook.

I hated this, but I may try to layer up more paint on it. I am thinking about expanding this idea of copying the gesture of the phone to a larger surface, but perhaps these little experiments will transform into something much bigger. I have been using quite a literal scale of the size of the phone because I find the scale quite intimate. However, I am interested in the magnitude of the touches, so perhaps scaling up will reinforce that point.

I am attempting to make a log of the gestures that I make on my phone by drawing over a video that I took of myself using my phone on my desk, but it is proving to be very difficult-partially because I am a little rusty with Adobe After Effects and partially because the layers of screens involved to record something as simple as touch is proving to be massively complicated. This is the second day in a row that I have tried to create this log via drawing over a video, but technology is rebelling against me.

My experiments have produced some interesting results, however. Here’s a video clip where the lag of the video does not map on to my drawn touch log, ironically, taken with my iPhone.

On Monday, the manifesto group met up to talk about our podcasting session that we are to have on Thursday in which we will discuss our responses to our manifesto zine. The first question hit us in a spot that was still a bit sore from Friday: what will the structure be?

I love podcasts. Today, I have already listened to three, but the organization of a good podcast does like in structural cues: This American Life breaks sections into acts and talks about a theme, Serial Tells a story from moment to moment, and RadioLab shifts according to different interviews and experts. They also use musical tools to do this, but I do not think we will incorporate that into our upcoming session this Thursday.

In the case of our responses to our manifesto, we all have talking points, which are our individual works. However, how those works relate to each other to create a convincing dialogue wasn’t immediately clear. In speaking about our individual responses there seemed to be this binary structure that evolved with a point and a counter point. For example, I am making work about touch and the social component of phones, and Connie is also playing with the interplay of the social/antisocial behaviors associated with screen addiction. So, that will be our two points of binary discussion. The other members of our group will follow suit.

We decided that this might be a good way for us to organize our zine as well. As the format of a book lends itself to a binary naturally with its two facing pages.

On Friday, the session was split up into two chunks: one, a discussion of our manifestos in the light of the Whole Earth Catalogue, and two, a discussion of a Hito Steyerl’s Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?

In the first part, our group was asked to wrestle with some of the larger aims of our zine and manifesto as a real object and publication-like the Whole Earth Catalogue. We were asked, what are three main aims of our zine? We had some trouble with that because it forced us to call into question our own voices and our responses to the problem of content/screen addiction. Were we experts? Could we make people make changes? Does saying we want to make people do something actually ever work? Who are we to say we have any kind of authority on the subject?

We all had done research, and we all had an idea of what we wanted the zine to look like and a general idea of the kind of individual responses we wanted to make. However, the mission of the zine as a whole was still a little unclear. Perhaps it contrasted to our manifesto, which was very poetic in nature.

We were asked to create three main aims for the manifesto, and in our first attempt, we realized that our aims were doing very similar things, so we had to re-think the impact that we wanted the zine to have.

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We realized that the main conceptual aim of our manifesto was to provoke questions and raise discussion about phone use rather than to outright condemn and pathologize a population of phone users. At first it seemed like this created a little less of a sense of urgency around the issue. However, we decided that leaving it up to the reader to come to their own conclusions based on the picture we are creating with our zine creates a more impactful punch, if it lands.

In terms of other aims, we want to make our zine accessible and interesting to phone users of a wide-range of ages. We plan to do this by making the zine interesting to touch and look at by pirating design tropes from Apple products to subvert the expectation of encountering the hallmark designs. However, we plan to do this sustainably, which is our last aim.

After creating aims, we attempted to break our zine content into different categories, but we couldn’t find something that really worked. By the same token, the exercise did help us to think about our zine and our responses from different angles.

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After a while, we realized we weren’t getting anywhere with trying to find categories to create a scaffolding for our work. Our individual responses seemed pretty clear cut at this point, and they follow a natural dialogue, so we decided we would take a retroactive approach to grouping them after our responses materialized more substantially.

We did compile a mini-zine of images from our research, however.

The second half of the day was really important after getting ‘stuck’ in the task of trying to find a set of categories to structure our zine. We had a conversation about conversational space, which was very important given the variety of first-languages that are in our cohort and in our individual manifesto groups. I needed to take a step back and acknowledge that I take up a lot of the air-time real estate as a native English-speaker, one who is terrified of silence at that. I was challenged to pause, think, and synthesize–to strive to be proactive in provoking conversation from everyone, especially when we are talking about complicated concepts.

After this conversation, we got to practice with the aforementioned text, which was something that had to potential to have us conversationally ‘stuck’ once more. It posed a question that it didn’t quite answer: ‘Is the internet dead?’ This suggested a yes or no, but it provided much more of an exploration of the idea than a definite conclusion. My interpretation was that she ultimately saying that the internet is not dead, but that is has transformed from its original iteration to grab other functions and explore other spaces beyond screens. This makes sense to me as something that is inherently plastic in an ecology that is rapidly evolving, human interface, and Steyerl explores that beautifully, and semi-abstractly.

Even though pieces of it were largely inaccessible, moments of clarity provided relatable footholds within the text by which people could speak to their own experience. Everyone in the room has anecdotal experience with the internet and watching how it has changed over time, so there were a wide array of unique takes to the original question and the pieces of historical and contemporary evidence Steyerl uses in order to substantiate her claim. Perhaps not every discussion point was entirely related to the text, but the text provided a means of creating an interesting discussion, and that momentum was key.

On Thursday we had an induction to illustrator and the print lab. I have a love/hate relationship with Illustrator, as I do most of my digital drawing on the iPad with a software called sketches.

However, getting acquainted to it sparked my inspiration to use it as a tool–that and the fact that it is necessary for using the laser cutter. I created some images of my sketchbook drawing using image-trace in illustrator to archive some of my doodles. This isn’t the final image that will be etched. Rather it is simply a vectorized transformation of how I am playing around withe the physical object in space.

We also got an induction to the print lab, and the possibilities there are really exciting. Our manifesto group is talking about the importance of paper and design (similar to Apple’s packaging products) to hammer an ironic point into our zine. Seeing the different paper possibilities and ink densities was very exciting.

Additionally, the possibility of making stickers made me quite interested in the idea of creating an insert to our zine–a small restraint sticker to put on iPhone screens. We’ll see if it manifests or not.

Wednesday, I had an induction to the making space, which was amazing. I consider myself a 2-D person. However, 3-D materials are proving to be a very necessary component of the object that I want to create for this iPhone gesture log. I became very excited at the prospect of manipulating wood, metal and plastic, but I am kicking myself for not signing up to to the laser cutting induction earlier. I’m thinking that I will have to cut a fair amount of acrylic.

I am considering taking clear 2mm acrylic and cutting it down into the the size of iPhone screens to create a linear log to record the way that we touch our phones in a conversation, or something of the like. This will essentially be lined up pieces of clear acrylic, maybe on one long strip of wood. The gestures would either be printed on the acrylic using some sort of clear oil base, or etched with a laser.

However, after the workshop, I am thinking that there may be more interesting ways of connecting them in a line-like using long screws or dowels of acrylic. There are so many possibilities!

Or, maybe, I could create a bunch of small screen sequences that are a word each, and tile them together somehow. The next step is to get my hands on the laser cutter.

On Tuesday, our group had a group writing tutorial, which left us a thinking about how to respond with our individual pieces–how collaborative they should be and how much we should rely on each other as resources.

We are all thinking quite individually about our responses, but collaborating is proving quite helpful in discussion. More importantly, it is helping us try to think of how we want to put together our images for our zine and our time table for that.

We are really interested in creating a design that makes a nod to the aesthetic of these smartphones, using their own marketing tactics to invite readers in to question their addictive nature in the content of our manifesto. Niko suggested that we could perhaps print our manifesto on toilet paper to invoke the action of scrolling while also making a statement about how we feel about the issue.

However, we agreed that in terms of materials, this might be too difficult to accomplish while incorporating images of our work. Too, we do not consider our manifesto the content that should be scrolled through aimlessly, put on toilet paper, its the content of the endless scroll on the screen. Perhaps that could become a piece of its own.

Then we started toying around with the idea of putting our zine in an Apple Box. Apple creates these wonderful, weighty boxes for their products. They are often all white, and splashed with the saturation of an image of an illuminated screen with a cosmic background. The instruction booklets found inside are a delight to open up as well, with very specific folding, and we are considering using these design aesthetics as a scaffolding for our own work.

Then, when on the way to the RCA library, I went to pull my iPad (my most precious drawing tool) out of my bag, and I heard a disarming ‘crunch’. there was a crack in the screen–the stuff of a digital illustrators worst nightmares.

I immediately booked the first Apple appointment that I could, and I had to have my iPad replaced. (Luckily, it was free!) The whole ordeal was a hassle, but I did get something out of it: a perfect, white, Apple box.

Monday, our Manifesto groups had our group tutorials, and we came back a little confused about what the next step would be. We are in a good place for starting to formulate our artist response, as we have created a solid idea of our Manifesto, but collaboration will be an important part of that response.

After our group tutorial, the manifesto group gathered to talk about our initial ideas, and the conversation was actually quite productive. Some of us have clearer ideas of what we want to create than others at this point: Niko is considering making some sort of restraint helmet that will criticize the idea of phone addiction; Neveah thinks she will probably make a poster of some sort; Aoran has ideas to some sort of restraint clothing that plays with imagery of straitjackets, and the rest of us are still in the process of experimenting.

I am really fascinated by the touch component of screen addiction. The average person with a smartphone touches their phone at least hundreds if not thousands of times a day. I find this very strange. If the phone did not respond with a moving screen, this touch register would mean nothing, and gestures would look ridiculous. Yet, touch is the main means of communicating through these screens, giving us a window to visual infinity.

I want to create some sort of visual log of just the touch, but finding the right materials for that is proving to be a little tricky.

On Monday, we had access to all of the printing materials from the fine art pathway session, so after discussing the beginnings of our ideas, I went to go and try to experiment with this idea of creating a touch timeline.

I used tracing paper and black ink on my fingers, and I tried to put one gesture per layer of tracing paper. I didn’t love the effects of the black ink on the slightly translucent tracing paper because they didn’t necessarily register as finger prints so much as smudges. Clare suggested that I use some of the transparent material that is used to keep the ink from drying as a sort of approximation for the oils in our hands that leave little smudges on the screen. I liked the effect of that as an ink. However, the tracing paper stacked up didn’t quite show the progression of gesture as well as I wanted it to.

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After experimenting with tracing paper, I worked with another, soft transparent material that I found in scrap. The nature of of the material proved to be too distracting . in the way that it captured light. It did, however, provide an interesting point of comparison for texture and texture differences.

Ultimately, I will have to create a touch registry in a different way. Luckily, I have my group for support on this issue. Francesca brought up an idea of three dimensional registers for touch, and this made me think of registering touch on the phone as a topographic map. More investigation is to come!