ARIELLE MELLA

LOS TAINOS HAN DESAPARECIDO

Los Tainos Han Desaparecido: The Tainos Have Disappeared [2020]

Los Tainos Han Desaparecido is a speculative research + design project rooted in my personal Indigenous heritage of the Taino people from the Caribbean. I have designed a theoretical immersive and decolonized installation dedicated to Indigenous Puerto Ricans that serves as a monument of digital cultural preservation. This project is an artistic interpretation of how artifacts could potentially be maintained, preserved, and exhibited in a future where original artifacts are lost to time. This project blends digital fabrication and code with the spirit of traditional carving methods through modern technologies. This project has two parts: a digitally fabricated interpretation of a zemi (deity or ancestral spirit, and a sculptural object housing the spirit) and a projection installation of mysterious, common, and undefined petroglyphs remaining from Taino culture.

Having a direct lineage from Taino and Arawak indigenous people from the Carribean (both in my Puerto Rican side and Dominican side of my bloodline), I often think about how that part of my culture was purposefully erased from history after my people were enslaved, raped, and massacred. I think about how our islands are living reminders of colonialism and European whiteness, and I fantasize of what our culture would look like if our religion, our agricultural inventions, and our design was not stomped out of the narrative.
[click to view research notes, more process shots, and more design justifications]

I used a digital sculpting app to shape my design out of “clay and stone” via modern technology. This enabled me to convert my idea into an stl to be easily printed + made tangible. I also tried to invoke the spirit ancient spirit of crafting these materials by trying to carve them out of a “block” of materials, instead of creating them on a computer with a mouse and keyboard. I utilized “futuristic” digital tools again to invoke the spirit of ancient design practices: I imagining I am hand carving this iconography like my ancestors had carved their important symbols into stone. I turned these petroglyphs into my own font that could be then used in my code.

Process shots of the zemi prototypes being printed. Note how the edges and layers are intentionally jagged and fragile to represent the fleeting nature of materials once used to create tangible objects that have decayed over time. These plastic models and digital .stl files serve as a digital way to create object permanence, so that the artifacts can never be lost to history ever again. I modified my printer infill and layer settings to try to recreate a rugged and imperfect look as if they were made of natural materials. They are about 2-3 inches in size all around. Depicted with a hand to show scale and the ergonomic hand design I tried to create, to symbolize how these objects were meant to be held, carried around, and worshipped because they embodied some sort of spiritual power.

After carefully turning my hand drawn symbols into svg’s, I decided to turn them into a font I can use in web design and code. I decided to limit myself to only open source software for this part to keep with the concept of futuristic, accessible design that can aid in cultural preservation. Pictured is an early draft of testing the usability of my created font in javascript. Here is a demo of me figuring out how to get the letters to be animated in wave form. The concept is to show these symbols being faded over time, washed away like water erodes stone, to symbolize the cultural erasure that has happened over the past 500 years.

Visual Mockup of Projected Installation

Visual Mockup of Displayed Artifacts Installation

SEASONAL DEPRESSION

DIGITAL REFLECTION

Digital Reflection [2020]

Digital Reflection [formerly known as Self as a System] is a living compilation of four projects I've created using my digital footprint and personal data. Using downloaded data from my Instagram, Google account, and iMessage history, I've created a series of "self portraits" using trends in my data and compiled the projects on a website to create an interactive mock-gallery installation. This piece interprets seemingly abstract data and attempts to create a general digital persona. [click to view live project]

The first image is from a project called Quarantine Mirror created in March of 2020. I used p5.js to create a conversion between greyscale values from webcam input to specific text words. The words used in the conversions were my most-frequently used words in the first three weeks of the pandemic according to my iMessage history, which are an accurate reflection of my state of being at the time. Solo, alone, isolated.

The second image is a manipulated version of my Instagram avatar that uses comment data sourced from my Instagram data download. I used the amount of comments I've made in the past year (14, 623) and used that number as a magic number in my code as a value for the speed in which I pixellate my avatar. It is meant to illustrate the way I present myself to strangers on the internet according to raw data in an abstract way, as these comments and this avatar are the only things an instagram user can use to learn about the "real" me.

The third image is a small selected image from a small project called Thirstagram that utilized a large comment data dump from Instagram. I created an algorithm in JavaScript to find my most used word in my comments, which is hot. Then I created another algorithm to remove every word that was not my most used word + emojis to create an abstract representation of my comment section persona on the internet.

The fourth image is from a small program I wrote that sorts through the thousands of pictures archived from my Google drive and Instagram posts+stories that identifies which week was my most active for online posting in 2020. During my busiest week, I shared 348 images, selfies, and memes to the internet abyss, and when trying to open the files on my device, I captured this image to serve as an abstract digital selfie. This mini project is called Me, irl.

[click to view bonus project] Bonus project made during Digital Reflection: What Does She Like? is a mini analysis of my Instagram likes using an algorithm that parsed through the data to detect the top liked subjects.

QUARANTINE MIRROR

SOCIAL IN OUR DISTANCE

Social In Our Distance [2020]

Social In Our Distance is an interactive animation written in JavaScript that explores loneliness and isolation through cursor data. The website has text values that are parsed into images of people, families, and pets (through a wingdings font I've modified) that can never be "clicked" or interacted with. As your mouse tries to hover over the 'people', they literally stay away from your mouse keeping a proper "social distance". [click to view live project]

To begin understanding my process, this first prototype sketch is a particle simulator that detects collision and changes the "bubble" color on contact. This code prototype supposed to represent the particles of data that will be bouncing around on the webpage and will be manipulated on collision.

This is a wingdings people font modified in Adobe Illustrator in both light and dark shades: top rows are lowercase and bottom rows are upper case. This font is used to convert text and statistics into abstract representations of people, to "humanize" the data and statistics being blindly thrown at us.

This next process sketch shows text being parsed and converted into a wingdings font I've modified to represent alphanumeric characters. The early prototype version of this ran very slowly.

This sketch shows particles being repelled from mouse input. I created these three prototypes before combining the functionality for each core part of this project in order to create the final version.

[link to github project repository]

EMOTIONAL TYPEFACES

COVID-ISOLATION

ILLUSTRATION

ARIELLE MELLA

Los Tainos Han Desaparecido: The Tainos Have Disappeared [2020]

Seasonal Depression [2020]

Digital Reflection [2020]

Quarantine Mirror [2020]

Social In Our Distance [2020]