If you'd like to take a deeper dive on this side of the project, please have a look at the annotated bibliography and contextual review sections. Quite a few of my documents from this period of the project can also be found on my personal website, including notes from various readings.

This phase of the project began with a more general question: "How do the contexts in which digital artifacts are made influence how they act and appear in our world?" This question came from delving into Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization, a 1934 book which foreshadowed the later development of science and technology studies. Here, I wanted to investigate how digital objects can embody the motives of those who make them, and what that may mean for those who interact with them.

What interested me was the particular microcosm of the tech startup, which journalists like Rachel Hawley have noted for their convergent, if not sometimes identical branding aesthetics. Here was a form of business peculiar to digital technology, with its own look, ethos, and as I would come to learn, economic logics.

To familiarize myself with the language and landscape of tech startups, I explored layman's resources like TechCrunch and CrunchBase. From there, I compiled a short list of firms which I investigated in depth, with a particular eye for how their visual format entangled with their business models and target audience.

While I found no pat conclusions in that regard, I did discover further resources on venture capital, such as the NVCA's (National Venture Capitalist Association) Annual Yearbook. Here, I became aware of the inordinate risk involved in the startup world—that few tech startups survive even a year, and that even large names like Uber have never turned a profit.

This fascinated me—why do venture capitalists make such gambles if most them are bound to fail? Ultimately, Nick Srnicek's Platform Capitalism offered some cogent answers in this regard: data is regarded as a massive and largely unexploited site of value, and investors are in a feeding frenzy for those who can gain, protect and leverage privileged access to it.

Delving into Failory, a database of shuttered startups, revealed a staggering array of such companies which had either been forced to pivot radically or shut down entirely. What I found very interesting was that not all of these names had closed for a lack of consumer interest—many popular services Vine studded the list.

With risk inherent all the way through to these startups, and constant change or closure as their only certainty, I felt I had found a productive angle to my initial question: startups are rooted in precarity, and produce artifacts which are similar precarious.

Here, I sought to depict my conclusions by visualizing the debris trail of this constant change—the bricked smart devices, abandoned brand swag, online communities forcefully vacated via end-of-service notice. Here, the idea was to evoke startups by using their  familiar visual signifiers, and then employing or situating them in unusual ways.

I was very interested in getting 'fresh eyes' on digitality by making some depiction of it using something other than screen-based media. A natural choice in this regard was the panoply of smart devices generated by various startups and established tech companies. What really drew me in the direction especially was Srnicek's angle on them in Platform Capitalism: as tools to extend the reach of data collection into the physical world.

Towards this end, I prototyped designs for a few smart devices, beginning with a smart speaker and smart shower drain.

Here, I wanted to take startup aesthetics, as commonly encountered and understood, and portrayy it through something discarded and obsolesced—debris from the process of disruption. I made several renders to visualize this side of the project and test out ideas as they arose.

It was after seeing Hito Steyerl's Liquidity Inc, and reading Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity that I began to feel the pun of 'liquidity'—which could mean either spending power or a constant state of change—would be an apt visual metaphor for the what I had come out of my textual research with.

I chose to communicate the constant change and risk inherent in the startup world through the aftermath of liquidity flowing elsewhere, with the smart objects taking the role of jetsam from a dried sea or riverbed.

To further establish the idea of 'liquidity' in the installation space, I planned on projecting water caustics—what you see at the bottom of a swimming pool—over a plane of sun-crackled mud.

General feedback at this stage made me aware that the project was becoming too ambiguous in meaning. So, I began a late exploration of more overt ways of getting across its ideas. I looked into producing a short, looping video essay to project over part of the installation space.

As a result of new circumstances stemming from COVID-19, the project turned away from a physical installation towards a video format, to communicate its ideas remotely.

Towards this end, I drafted a short premise and storyboard for a five to seven minute video. Absent the possibility of filming anything, I turned to a combination of rendered imagery and Creative Commons stock footage to create the video. In this case, I planned to make liberal use of the stock footage offered at Pexels.

To help select stock footage, I created a short list of criteria based on video branding guidelines published by Uber, Google, and Lyft. Here, the footage would help compose a three part-video: first, a brand mission ad, outlining ways we encounter products from tech startups, followed by a more freeform sequence to work in the idea of precarity, finishing with a 'break-up letter' from venture capital as it flows to more profitable opportunities.

Given that my project was no longer thinking of digitality outside of the screen, I also took the opportunity to include depict some common illustration and user interface tropes I had encountered in my research.

As the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, I plan to continue developing this project as a video piece first, re-integrating my ideas in physical space as static embellishments for a screening space.