Weekly 3: Reading Response Images to It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic, and Rich User Experience, UX and Desktopization of War.

1. Internet Ugly Image

this is a screenshot of a chat. There is a picture of a dried starfish on a blue background with one leg inside of a small, white high heel.

This image was found on tumblr. It can be considered to be "ugly" under the description put forth in the Lialina reading. It's been compressed and resize from a lower quality image, as shown by the pixellation. The content, rather than the aesthetics, is paramount to the humor in this. True to the disposable nature of such content, I actually cannot find the specific post and caption, though I think the context was "my friend is super high and texting me".

2. "Beautiful" Image

this is a gif of an animal skull on a beach on which salt crystals have formed. It is inside of the Dead Sea, which has a very high salt content.

This image was pulled off of imgur, a popular image hosting site. It doubles as a forum as people can vote on images and can comment/start discussions about an image/set of images. I have seen this image multiple times, on tumblr and on reddit, where it has been shared many times. A popular comment was that this was "the highest quality gif" that a user had ever seen. I chose this image to represent an internet "beautiful" image, as it's fairly high quality and aesthetically pleasing/well composed, though I've also seen low-quality versions of it due to the nature of internet sharing.

3. Bonus: Mixed Aesthetic; The Third Wave of the Internet Image?

this is a pixellated image of a balding, middle aged man with glasses (George Costanza from the 90's sitcom <i>Seinfeld</i>). He has the windows95 logo on top of his head. There is a yin yang sign in the upper left hand corner and a nintendo seal of approval in the right. There is unrelated Japanese text in red along the bottom. This is an animated gif of a skeleton typing numbers into a calculator and writing them down in a legder. This is a collage of different internet memes and images from windows XP/art history. It has the text, 'who needs friends when memes are closer' on a windows XP dialog box. this is a purple tinted cityscape. It contains Japanese text saying 'new birthday'.

I've noticed a trend arising recently of a third aesthetic which combines elements of internet "ugly" (sloppy image/glitch art) and "beauty" (considered composition, higher quality image). It often co-opts elements of many elements of internet image, such as deliberately glitched/pixellated images, photoshopped collage, ultimately meaningless language (Japanese, Chinese are common but English will occur as well), and juxtapose pop culture references with elements of Classical art history images such as Michaelangelo's sculpture of David. The aesthetic may also incorporate blocky/lo-poly looking animation, reminiscent of early 3D CG work.