We figured, if our video was being split up and sent around the world and then back again to a single screen, why not use something recognizable as our content?

So we used our faces.

We wanted to uses faces because they are immediately familiar--- the formation of where eyes + noses + mouths are pretty standard, and would be understandable to non-designers viewing this work. But just because it it is understandable, doesn’t mean it's not disturbing.

The website with the gif can be found here.

We split up our faces so they could be sent to the different AWS servers. We also added in some other objects representing some of the countries where we were using servers.That way, when the images come back, the make up partial faces, mashed-up faces, and mashed up new characters, like a koala with bangs or a sushi face.

For the final step, we sent the html website to people around the world, using Mechanical Turk. The workers who accepted those jobs were asked to outline the shape of the gif as it occurred at 3 seconds, 6 seconds, and 9 seconds, in our 10 second long gif. Although there is definitely some human error in this process, we are beginning to be able to compare what “3 seconds” looks like in India versus Italy versus Canada. Because of locations and speeds of the servers, the website looks different in each geographic location. And putting them together allows us to see the geography in a very visual way.

One of the images above is from Caldwell, Ohio and the other is from Berlin, Germany. Both represent the shape of the gif in their location at 9 sec. It's so interesting how different they are, each accessing the same servers, but at different locations. We'll continue to get drawings like this back for the next month so we can keep comparing shape to location. And the final study will appear at the Becoming Digital Exhibition in January. 

Thanks to my amazing partners in this workshop Florence Warner and Nick Kim.

And also thanks to Curtis Roth for leading the workshop and dedicating so much time and research to this experiment!

The workshop focused on throbbers-- those spinning circles that appear when you wait for a webpage or video to load.   Curtis has set up a system for us to visualize the physical distance of the infrastructure that makes up the internet. He did this by setting up access to 10+ servers across the... View full entry

Our 2nd workshop just ended, this time, led by Curtis Roth. Curtis Roth is a professor at OSU Knowlton School of Architecture and was out 2nd workshop leader. He has done 2 fellowships in the past 2 years--one at OSU in 2015 and one in Stuttgart, Germany in 2016. Both of those projects have to do... View full entry

In the final step of the assignment, Zeina and Jon wanted us to return these mesh into a new sort of pile. Using our resulting meshes from the last portion, we put 3 flat cuts through the volume. This is one of the results--- totally departed from the original meshes. SO, again this "brick"was... View full entry

So the next day, Jon and Zeina informed us that those scans would be the source material for the next phase. One unexpected part of the workshop was the democratic, or communal aspect of the tasks. Everything created was eventually shared in common folders, which could be downloaded, adjusted... View full entry

Hello! My name is Megan Mohney-- a thesis student and a member of the “BECOMING DIGITAL” seminar this semester. We just finished our first workshop with MILLIONS. We met Jon May and Zeina Koreitem on Friday after they gave a talk to the school in our amazing new atrium space!^ Instagram post... View full entry