December 13, 2022 Fall 2022
Maya shared their work in progress piece collecting headlines including “cops killing” laid out in a long list in blue text.Scrapism is a class teaching the eponymous practice of web scraping for artistic, emotional, political and critical ends, rather than those of business or government. Scrapism was taught in Fall 2022 by lead teacher Sam Lavigne with myself, Ilona Brand, as the assistant teacher. We brought participants into this practice by teaching them how to scrape text, images, and videos from the web and “re-database” them as a subversion of their original context.
Brent shared a face-mashed monstrous fake meta employee profile with the phrase “I’m a proud Meta employee” repeated over and over again.In class discussions, we talked about archiving, how to present and layout scraped materials, and how the surveillance state determines who gets to access what. We asked what we choose to archive and why and how that compares to the vast corporate archives that companies keep of our personal data. We learned about methods for cutting up texts, super-cutting videos and collaging images computationally as different strategies to imbue different meanings from the materials.
Nat shared an audio-visual piece that consists of a blur of many mouths from news media speaking over each other and overlapping into a shape that looks like a flower.In our final class, participants presented work which utilizes any of the techniques that they learned in class.
Gladys shared a concrete poem map made of words scraped from weather news headlines about typhoons. The words swirl into typhoon shapes.
Jacob shared an archive of moon observations and drawings presented as a collage of the drawings and the text overlaid atop them.
Class photo taken on the last day with participants holding up whatever random object they had near their desk.