This is a screanshot of a MySpace background I loaded onto my blog to test it out. It was lovely blinking away but it made the text/research inaccessible. I’ve been looking at these stamps just as I did as a child with a special sticker on my best notebook, marking it as my territory. I have yet to find the right thing for me. I made some of these blinking GIF’s years ago and dropped them into a Director CD-ROM adventure into a dream. They are still on a zip disk probably sitting peacefully at the bottom of a landfill somewhere in Canada…Olia Lialina is one to follow for her work with glitter and animated GIF’s and other such visual stimuli. Her article Vernacular Web 2 wraps a context around the design/layout of the blog and the MySpace account in forming indicators of identity; signifiers of status, mood, likes and dislikes, affiliations.I have pinched the following background info from a paper by Lialina to highlight that pinpointing the actual source is difficult when speaking about the ‘current’ situation of making/carving out social space and identity on the internet. The paper is found here.
In the beginning this article was an “index.html” saved in the “glitter” folder. Then it got the working title “The work of users in times of perfect templates”. Then it became “Rich User Experience for the Poor” and was presented at the New Network Theory conference. After the presentation, UCSB professor Alan Lui suggested to rename it to “Homesick”. But for the moment I’ll leave it as