Remote Experience: Donna Haraway

Sam Scaife

At the start of this project I wrote a very broad brief which would allow me lots of freedom when it came to how the project would manifest. It was clear however that I wanted to make a more artistic piece which would comment on an aspect of digital technologies. I chose this approach because I wanted my idea to come naturally from reading and exploration. Ultimately I think this has let me work on something I find really interesting, though the approach is not without limitations. Several times within the project when I felt a little lost as to whether I was staying on brief I was unable to reread it and ground myself, so it lead a various elements creeping away from an exploration of idea like I wanted. The brief also hinted towards creating a physical object which as I developed my ideas this objects moved from being tangible to existing digitally within the cloud.

One point within the project I change my direction quite drastically going from creating a device to gather data to using data which people are already providing. This fall within what I wrote my dissertation about so I was able to bring in my understanding of these areas into my design choices which I feel has made my final piece stronger.

I took quite a broad approach for this project, starting by visiting galleries and reading science fiction from the 80’s and 90’s before moving on to explore these themes within the digital realms. It felt like a very natural process as my research brought up lots of ideas I have had over the past few years and allowed me to build on them.

I am in two minds as to weather using the project to learn JavaScript was a good idea. I was able to learn a large amount within a very short amount of time and now I have a whole new set of skills. Its also opened my eyes to the potential of cloud development and web apps as a creative medium. However due to having to learn it all from scratch it meant that I had to take time away from the design and finessing my final outcome. It also meant that when I encounter a bug it took me far longer to solve than if I had been building it the app in a language which I knew.

When looking at the process as a whole I am really happy with what I have learnt as a result of this project and the direction which it went in. I do feel that my final work can still be developed further than I was able to take it within the space of this project. I would like to push the visuals of the project some more and also add some more functionality to the site so that users can understand the process behind what is being displayed. I feel that I have been able to produce a piece suitable for a gallery space and one that talks to an artistically aware digital audience.