The tenets of universal design are synergistic with the original dreams of a free and open, accessible web. I choose the accessible, affordable, community-driven tools of the web with purpose. Code is a human-readable text ::: a literature, a score, a script. The dream of the early internet was similar to the vision of radio, cable-access television, video. It promised an accessible, affordable medium for community-driven transmission of culture. It is difficult to remember that vision in today's landscape of profit-driven, commerce-mediated web silos. We produce content for free. Our creativity is shaped by opaque, proprietary tools.
Old-school codework is becoming a folk art as the mainstream technology world is subsumed by proprietary platforms. Generative, networked, "ecological" work has a materiality I am interested in bringing to the surface. It is important to preserve not only the experience of the living work itself but also its working levers and gears :::: its language of motion and change ::: the machine and networked environment in which it was conceived and presented.
access: intent
cloud work
This gathering of cloud work was funded by the MN State Arts Board in 2022.
This aspect of the work presented here had a R&D goal.
I met weekly with a collaborator with knowledge of
web useability
for informal code review and
discussion. We began by working on an
accessibility study for a more conventional arts
learning use case. This resulted in the website:
https://mctavishquilting.com.
This gave us the
opportunity to explore things like closed-captioning
for teaching videos but also gave us an opportunity
to think about making a volume of archival
materials accessible in an easy to navigate, crosssensory
way: to allow visitors with multiple
objectives and learning styles ways to enter and
interact with information.
From this experience, we moved on to think about
cross-sensory translation of my more abstract,
conceptual artistic work. I am
still exploring this aspect of the project. We went
through a series of prototypes that included sound,
moving images (web art drawn live), and text. We
kept returning to the concept of legibility and the
cross-sensory possibilities of multi-modal work.
My work plays with legibility /
abstraction ::: the unspoken, underlayments of
human-to-human and human-to-machine
relationships. I wanted to think about accessibility in
ways that felt organically related to the work itself.
When the work is abstract in one sensory
dimension, it should retain its character in another dimension.
Multi-modal work creates this dimensionality
organically. Is this enough? I am still trying to
understand accessibility in a deep, integrated way.
Perhaps this was just an exercise in cross-sensory erasure ...
dissolution ... fragmentation ... it felt like this:
Legibility of form is obfuscated by commercial,
black-box, mediated platforms. Providing opensource
access to the codebase behind my
explorations is also part of my goal. All code is
available through my
github account (such a shoebox of stuff ... sorry)
I started to consider access in terms of live,
internet-based work vs. fixed formats that are more
easily passed along to venues to support (mp3,
mp4, print). New media remains challenging for
presentation by small, traditional gallery spaces
and film festivals. People are much more familiar
with fixed-format art.
I wanted to expand the accessibility of my creative
artifacts to support venues and individuals that feel
intimidated by web-based, new media. I wanted to
create old-school, fixed-format "objects" that were
more than a poor-resolution screen capture of my
living, algorithmic, generative practice. I developed
code to take a central algorithmic seed and
produce mp3s, mp4s, print books, pdf files, and
web animations::: to expand the form and
accessibility of my endpoints. This work was
presented in installations, artist talks, and at a film
festival. You can view some of this exploration at: