From Me to You

GR - Graduate

In an essay called From My to Me (2020), internet art pioneer Olia Lialina writes: Me is cheap, Me is easy to control, Me is easy to channel, Me is slave of its own reflection, Me is a slave of the platforms that make the reflection glossy. Me is data. Me is data closest to metadata. This make Me just perfect to satisfy advertisers and to sate neural networks.

Studying the self-publishing web trends since the early internet, Lialina's essay explores the web design changes from user practices of making My Websites -- websites primarily built to express love for a celebrity or collect lists of favorite items, to the practices of making Me Websites - websites solely promoting the work and personalities of its makers. In this shift, building websites ceases to be a process that builds one's love for Avril Lavigne, and becomes a practice that develops love for oneself. But is this love...or narcissism? In the contemporary context of social media platforms where one's coding skills are replaced by one's self-stalking, would it be safe to claim that web design is solely a marketing tool?

Considering the shift from web design as a thinking medium to web design as a thought-through medium where all we see is a reflection of ourselves, this session focuses on building websites about somebody else, not ourselves. By learning about each other and approaching this knowledge as data, the students will explore their listening and understanding skills through coding and web design.