Alien WebMD:
A Collaborative Net Art Webzine
Alien WebMD is a webzine featuring work relating to the effects of late capitalism and the growing need for possible alternatives.
Frequently isolated, deprived of healthcare and support, and obsessed with productive immortality, online diagnostic tools, listicles, and comments sections have become our fast doctors, therapists, life coaches, and confidants, however ineffective. Alien WebMD attempts to critique this alienating process and the many unsavory results of unfettered capitalism today. The zine’s purpose is to act as a creative, community-building outlet to parody our predicament and to strategize and comment on the need for universal, guaranteed healthcare and greater economic equality.
Website & 1st Issue
To create this project, I built the website using Atom, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and sourcing gifs from GifCities (as well as designing some of my own in Illustrator and Photoshop). The main website has content explaining the purpose of the zine, a place to submit zine contributions, and links to archives and the current issue. It also links to the Symptoms Board Drawing Pad, where anyone can draw and submit art in real-time to the Symptoms Board database.
The zine issue contents are collaborative, sourced via friends responding to calls for submission. I took their submissions, along with my own recently created interactive and video pieces, and collaged them together to complete this first issue. In total, there are 27 contributions that include photographs, animations, poster art, essays, sketches, videos, poems, and interactive games.
Style & Format
The website, made with nostalgia for 1990s net art, sets the stage for unconventional, non-hierarchical, and exploratory work. The zine issue intentionally scrolls both vertically and horizontally, while the content is also not displayed on a grid, encouraging non-linear engagement. It harkens back to a fleeting time when the Internet was more of a Wild West, much unlike the standardized, surveilled, and corporatized Internet we use today. Its design aims to recapture the period when the web was unpredictable, experimental, and downright weird. As a web platform, this zine allows for a broad array of submission content, including writing, audio, graphics, videos, and interaction.
Theme
The zine’s focus, late capitalism, is a term that points out the absurdities of the modern economy, which is rife with cynical neoliberal interventions: privatized healthcare, a gig economy that glorifies working oneself to death, “wellness” and “life-hacking” ideologies that blame the individual while ignoring structural factors, brands’ sometimes ill-fated attempts at co-opting the culture of the public — these are a few examples. It at once expresses anger over the growing and persistent inequalities exposed by the financial crisis, as well as optimism that capitalism is in its last stage — that there are other, possibly better, systems of society. This zine was created with the hope that we are at an ideological and political turning point and aims to vocalize a collective critique.
The home page, where you can submit art to future issues, view the zine archive, and access the Symptoms Board to draw and add art instantly to the database
Issue 1 — Late Capitalism: Symptoms, Management, and Interventions
Symptoms Board
I created the Symptoms Board Drawing Pad using the p5.js Javascript library. It is a simple application that allows you to draw on click with a clearing function. You can then post your drawing to the Symptoms Board, which utilizes Google Firebase. After posting, you are automatically directed to the full board to view your drawing among the array.
The Symptoms Board allows participants to make real-time contributions of creative work in between zine issues. While there is a directed topic, the resulting material is a bit of a graffiti wall, with the whimsical scribbles evident of having fun with the tool.
Play this video to see a walkthrough of the Symptoms Board Drawing Pad and posting to the database
The Symptoms Board Drawing Pad — try submitting your own drawing! Simply click and drag on the black pad. If you want to start over, click “Clear.”
A sample of the hundreds of drawings currently up on the Symptoms Board database
More drawing samples on the Symptoms Board database
Exhibition
In May – June 2018, the project was a part of the UC Davis Arts & Humanities Graduate Exhibition at the Manetti Shrem Museum. I designed the installation in the form of a doctor’s office, where the Drawing Pad and Symptoms Board served as a triage where people could express their late capitalist symptoms. Instead of a doctor at the desk, an unmanned computer was on display showcasing the zine issue. The zine and the Drawing Board in this context worked to symbolize a lack of access to meaningful care.
Other elements included: an alien net art collage, serene and cliche “wellness” images on the wall, a doctor’s certificate, business cards, an illuminated name plate, fake plants, a book and magazine collection of foreboding science, psychology, and diets, and pill bottles with “System Change” and “Block Out Your Mind” prescriptions. The fake plants and outdated books gave the office an abandoned quality that exists in a possibly end-of-capitalism time. This installation allowed for a fuller immersion into the zine’s concepts: our collective anxiety about the future, our present isolation, and the uncertainty that we will have either healthcare or human contact as we age.
During the exhibition, viewers could engage interactively with the installation, clicking through the zine at the desk as well as submitting drawings to the Symptoms Board.
