Andrea Benedetto

General Journal of Network Requests stores a 12-hour-long log of network requests collected from uBlock Origin (uBO), a free, open-source ad and content blocker. A network request is made each time a web page asks a browser to either upload or download data to or from a specific online location. Among these requests, there are ones related to tracking, advertising and malware, which uBO either blocks or redirects. Thus, the 858-page book mediates the scale at which data from mundane, day-to-day online interactions are collected for profit. The design is a contemporary reinterpretation of a bookkeeping journal, and the book-block has been entirely generated through a basil.js script starting from a CSV table containing the data collected from uBO.

Gabrielle Scherrer is a prolific watercolourist. Many of her pieces feature landscapes, but not a single one perfectly recreates an already existing image. Behind such conventional beauty, lays a surprising mix of feelings, memories, and thoughts. This catalogue is a curated, expandable collection of her watercolours, and is based on the idea of the “fluctuation of sense”, i.e., how meaning can be split into three different factors—denotation, connotation, and evocation—when approached semiotically.

This project consisted in an analysis and comparison of two pens from a semiotic viewpoint. More specifically, I investigated on their formal and functional characteristics, and thus on which kind of valorisation they are given by their users. The study quickly took the shape of a series of nested paragraphs, each of which detailing their specificities and commonalities both in terms of aesthetics and usage.